StubHub advertised ticket prices no one could pay — Canada fined it $1.3M

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.