Ticket resale marketplace StubHub this week apologized to sellers for several recent, undisclosed Web site outages that temporarily halted sales.
The outages occurred throughout the day on Friday, September 9, and affected an unknown, but significant, number of large sellers who could not make sales for events on Friday and Saturday, September 10.
StubHub initially sent out emails to sellers on Friday acknowledging that the company was experiencing site issues. “We understand this may be impacting your business negatively and apologize for any inconveniences,” the company wrote.
Last night, September 13, the company sent out a follow up email to apologize for the inconvenience and offer sellers small coupons that can be used for purchases on the site. StubHub did not give details on the cause of the outages, and a spokesperson did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
Besides offering coupons to make amends, the company ruled out reimbursing sellers for lost sales time.
“Some of you have asked about getting reimbursed for the loss of sell time on the site Friday. Unfortunately, we just can’t do it,” the company said. “We can never guarantee that tickets listed on StubHub will sell, and everyone is affected when service is interrupted.
“What we can do is try harder and do better. Nobody wins when StubHub is down. We disappointed all of our customers on Friday. We will continue to invest in improvements to our site performance and our platform.”
StubHub is far and away the country’s largest ticket marketplace, according to TicketNews’ exclusive rankings, and successfully processes thousands of orders daily. But occasionally, glitches happen that have negatively affected the site for short periods of time.
Earlier this year, StubHub experienced problems with PDF orders and offered sellers rebates of 50 percent off of their sell fees. In some cases, sellers had to manually re-load orders hundreds of orders into the StubHub system.
In March 2010, the site suffered through problems when it installed new backend systems. Sellers in that instance experienced site slowdowns and difficulties loading inventory.
