Small businesses that sell online should treat the CMA’s latest hidden-fee case as a practical warning about how prices are shown before checkout.
The Competition and Markets Authority has ordered StubHub UK to refund more than 50,000 customers and has fined the company close to £900,000 after finding that mandatory fees were not included in ticket prices at the start of the sales process.
The case is about a large ticket marketplace, but the lesson is wider. If a customer cannot see unavoidable charges early enough to compare one offer with another, the business may be creating the kind of pricing problem regulators now describe as illegal drip pricing.
What happened?
According to the CMA, StubHub UK did not show fans the total price upfront when they were buying tickets. Mandatory costs such as service and delivery fees were added later, at the final stage of checkout.
The regulator says this happened between 6 April and 7 December 2025. It has ordered more than £590,000 in refunds to 51,350 customers, with an average payout of about £10.33 per transaction. The company was also fined £889,200.
The CMA said affected customers do not need to take action because StubHub UK will contact them and repay refunds automatically to the card used for the purchase.
Why this matters to SMEs
Many smaller firms use ecommerce platforms, booking tools, delivery add-ons, payment gateways, marketplace listings or quote forms that assemble a final price in stages. That can be legitimate where options are genuinely optional. The risk comes when an unavoidable charge is held back until a late step.
For an SME, the immediate issue is not only the possibility of enforcement. Hidden or late-added fees can also damage conversion, cause complaints, trigger chargebacks and undermine trust at exactly the point when a customer is deciding whether to complete the order.
The CMA framed the StubHub UK case as part of its wider work on illegal online pricing practices. It said drip pricing was banned last year under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, and pointed businesses towards its clear pricing checklist.
That makes this a useful moment for owners and managers to check how their own customer journey works in practice, especially if pricing is partly controlled by a third-party platform or plugin.
What to check now
Start by walking through your sales process as a customer would. Look at the first product page, search result, booking page, basket and checkout screen. If a fee is mandatory, ask whether the customer can see it from the point where they first see or compare the price.
Common areas to review include booking fees, service charges, compulsory delivery fees, handling fees, admin charges and unavoidable payment-related charges. If they cannot be avoided, they should not appear as a surprise at the end.
It is also worth checking promotional messages. A headline price that looks attractive but excludes compulsory costs may create a misleading impression, even if the final total is shown before payment.
For businesses using marketplace or ticketing software, the owner should still understand how the platform displays total prices. A supplier’s default setting may not be enough if it creates a poor or non-compliant customer journey.
Link this to wider compliance work
Pricing should sit alongside other routine compliance checks, such as tax, payroll and consumer-facing terms. For example, small employers already reviewing systems after HMRC’s Employment Allowance software update may want to use the same discipline for customer-facing ecommerce settings.
Firms selling through digital channels may also want to keep an eye on the broader direction of online regulation and trade. Recent UK-Malaysia digital trade talks show how consumer protection, data and digital systems are increasingly part of everyday business policy, not just a concern for large platforms.
The takeaway
The StubHub UK decision is a reminder that clear pricing is now a live enforcement issue. SMEs do not need to wait for a complaint to find out whether their checkout is clear enough.
A short review of mandatory fees, price displays and platform settings can reduce regulatory risk and make the buying process simpler for customers. The safest principle is straightforward: if the customer has to pay it, show it clearly and early.
Source: Competition and Markets Authority.