eBay takes complete responsibility for the transactions that they facilitate. eBay guarantees that your item will ship and be delivered within a certain time and will be as described. The seller can still mess with you, but the timeframe is limited and eBay will handle the dispute. AirBnB is more of a "sucks to be you" style when it comes to canceled reservations, which is pretty weak.

At the end of the day, the most eBay will do is make sure you get your money back if the seller doesn't deliver. That's exactly what StubHub did, AND they offered him hundreds in gift certificates as well.

The problem here is that getting one's money back doesn't feel like enough, because you're losing out on massive appreciation of the purchase between when you bought it and now.

This is one of the most difficult customer service issues to solve, because the cost to correct the situation in the customer's eyes has no upper bound.

With eBay the seller also has to deliver in a timely fashion. You're right, if they fail then the best that happens is you get your money back, but you find out reasonably quickly whether or not they're going to perform, and there's never any confusion about whether or not the transaction has completed.

So a big part of this problem is that StubHub is letting sellers cheat buyers out of massive appreciation by not giving them a reasonably deadline for delivery, nor penalizing the sellers for failing to perform.

The potential costs to correct the situation don't have to be an issue, because StubHub could conceivably push those costs onto the seller trying (and in this case apparently succeeding!) to cheat the system. They could write their seller contract to state that the seller is responsible for all costs borne by StubHub acquiring replacement tickets, and that would remove their incentive to pull stunts like this.

As others have mentioned, in many cases the seller doesn't physically have the tickets at the time of sale, and might only get them a few days before the game. Ticketmaster cooperates with venues to do this to -- dum dum dum -- avoid ticket resale. That's the problem.

If they're going to support such tickets then they need some big "seriously, deliver what you sold" penalties for bad sellers.

This would be fine if they weren't advertising a "Fan Protect Guarantee." They are offering additional safe guards or at least the appearance of them to encourage buyers to take on that risk. It is extremely shady when they then don't follow through.

They technically did follow through. Their guarantee is to provide comparable tickets or a refund. Comparable tickets were not available (because their idea of "comparable" includes "at the same price," ha ha ha) and they provided a refund.

They did not follow through on actually protecting the fans, just restoring the original money. They are presenting the appearance that they will ensure the purchase, while the terms actually promise no such thing.

Yeah, the "Fan Protect Guarantee" is more like "Fan Protect Guarantee Unless The Price Goes Up A Lot."

This.

The old Stubhub (pre-eBay) made a BIG deal of denied-at-door situations, and local managers had broad discretion to source replacement tickets, even at higher cost.

Nowadays, they realize that doing so is not profitable in the short term.

What? A company oversold its guarantee by using creative definitions?

Next thing you know, people are going to start offering a lifetime guarantee that's only good for the lifetime of the product! ;)