The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2020
StubHub advertised ticket prices no one could pay — Canada fined it $1.3M
Feb 2020: StubHub paid Canada $1.3M — its sites, emails and app showed ticket prices no buyer could reach once the fees landed.
StubHub Canada Ltd. · 2020-02
What happened
StubHub showed Canadian fans prices for concert and sport tickets — on its websites, in emails, in its mobile app — that no buyer could ever actually pay: mandatory fees arrived later in the checkout and always took the total higher. Canada's Competition Bureau found the prices 'unattainable', a misleading pricing claim under the Competition Act.
On 13 February 2020, StubHub Canada Ltd. and StubHub Inc. agreed to pay a $1.3 million penalty and correct their pricing displays. The timing was awkward: Viagogo had completed its acquisition of StubHub only the week before, inheriting the regulator's invoice along with the marketplace.
The penalty was smaller than Ticketmaster's $4.5 million eight months earlier, but the rule was the same, and the Bureau was keeping count: drip-pricing settlements across ticketing, telecom, home furnishings and car rentals had by then passed $11 million. Two years later Parliament wrote drip pricing into the Competition Act itself.
Why it happened
- The advertised number was an invitation, not a price: fees turned every listing into one nobody could pay.
- The deception ran across three surfaces — site, email, app — and a claim repeated everywhere is still one claim.
- Ticketmaster had paid for the same funnel eight months earlier; the practice outlived the precedent.
The lesson
The price in the listing must be the price at the checkout: fees that arrive late make every ad for the listing misleading — on the site, in the email and in the app alike.
Aftermath
The consent agreement was registered with the force of a court order, and StubHub, now under Viagogo, corrected its displayed prices. Drip pricing became an express provision of the Competition Act in 2022.
Sources
- Competition Bureau Canada — StubHub to pay $1.3 million penalty for advertising unattainable prices for event tickets
- CBC News — StubHub to pay $1.3M penalty for misleading about fees tacked on to tickets
spotted an error? The club wants to know.
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