StubHub, the nation’s largest secondary ticket company, this week notified its largest ticket reseller clients that its Web site was experiencing some unexpected problems relating to the installation of new backend systems.
An unknown number of brokers have been having trouble with site slowness, and difficulty loading inventory listings, since yesterday, March 30, and possibly for a longer period of time. In addition, StubHub’s frontend retail site also was down for a brief period today while the company’s IT team worked on the problems.
The exact nature of the problems were not disclosed, but in email issued to Largesellers today, the company explained that the transition from “old legacy code base to a more nimble one” was more complex than anticipated, which resulted in “bugs and instability.” In an effort to make it up to brokers, the company was temporarily reducing its sell fee by 5 percentage points.
“We anticipate that the majority of the site issues will be fixed by the end of today and we should be back to full functionality within the next week as the new enhancements and implementations are completed,” StubHub spokesperson Glenn Lehrman told TicketNews.
While the IT team was working on the issues, brokers were not being held responsible for slow fulfillment confirmations, the company said in the email to Largesellers today, the text of which is below:
March 31, 2010
Valued StubHub Seller:
As most of you are aware, StubHub has spent the last several weeks releasing new products and features to StubHub.com. These releases are serving a dual role: The first is to provide enhanced features and to better set expectations across the site for all of our customers. The second is to move us from an old legacy code base to a more nimble one which will allow us to develop more quickly and with less downtime. We believe that these changes are necessary for us to continue to innovate and remain a top ecommerce destination.
Unfortunately, the complexity of our system has resulted in more bugs and instability than we were expecting. The site slowness and instability that many of you have encountered has not met our high standards. Last night, we uncovered a critical issue in our database infrastructure which needs to be corrected immediately. Currently, our data team is installing a fix which has and will lead to further site slowness and the possibility that some features and services are unavailable for periods of time throughout today.
We sincerely apologize for the past and current site issues. We take our responsibility to you, our selling community, very seriously, and apologize for the disruption to your business that we’ve caused. To more concretely demonstrate our regret, we will be reducing your sell fee by 5 percentage points (e.g. if your sell fee is currently 15%, that will be reduced to 10%) on all of your sales that occur during the remainder of this week. The reduction will be applied automatically on any sales taking place from this morning at 9:30 AM PT through 11:59 PM PT on Saturday, April 3, 2010. We do not expect this to make up for lost sales or the frustration you are experiencing, but we do hope that it demonstrates our commitment to working with you as we make necessary changes for the long term growth and stability of our business.
Until these issues are resolved, we ask that you use the site only for things which are extremely time sensitive. You will not be held responsible for late confirmation of orders or fulfillment problems which result from your inability to access the site.
We know that apologies or fee discounts will not change the fact that we have caused some of you significant issues selling your tickets. What we are focused on doing now is quickly resolving these problems and providing a quicker and more stable platform that you can rely on in the future as you have in the past.
Thank you for your patience and for selling on StubHub.
Sincerely,
Scott Polhemus
Sr. Manager Seller Development
Jonathan Lesser
Director Supply and Fulfillment
Noah Goldberg
Sr. Director Customer Operations
Chris Tsakalakis
President StubHub
