How “Virtual Waiting Room” works
Let try to explain, in simple words so everyone without technical knowledge can understand, how this technology works.
We at herwin.tech believe that this kind of technology is worth for any entrepreneur to keep in mind when starting a new business and looking for technology that helps achieve challenging goals. And our focus is to help entrepreneurs.
What is a “Virtual Waiting Room”
queue-it, a platform that provides this technology explains it well. Virtual Waiting Rooms let you control online traffic in high-demand situations to deliver a better user experience and treat visitors fairly.
When web traffic surges suddenly, it overloads even the world's largest businesses. Websites and apps are built with assumptions of how much traffic they normally handle. Making a site scalable on demand is technically challenging and can prove costly. Every website has limits. Virtual Waiting Rooms is a “layer” before your website that controls the amount of traffic allowed to enter to your web site. When the website is to busy, over its capacity, new visitors are redirected to a another website (the waiting room), with information that helps users understand why they are in the waiting room and how much long they need to wait. It improves the user experience.
https://queue-it.com How this technology manages website traffic
When to use this technology
Scheduled events
Concerts, shopping holiday sales, conference registrations, and similar situations have a fixed start time by which visitors will already have accumulated on your website and exceed your website’s capacity.
To manage pre-event build-up, you offload early visitors from your infrastructure to Queue-it’s pre-queue waiting room. Early visitors will see a page with a countdown timer. At sale or registration start, visitors are randomized and assigned a place in line. This has the added benefit of neutralizing any advantage to arriving early.
Visitors who arrive after the sale starts get a first-come, first-served place in the queue.
When the waiting room is empty, Queue-it will switch off the waiting room unless traffic inflow exceeds your configured thresholds.
Invite-only
Some sales or registrations should only be accessed by a select group of visitors. Examples could include members-only ticketing onsales, product drops for customers with a certain loyalty status, or financial product applications for customers that meet certain criteria.
You can manage access to your sales or registrations using an invite-only waiting room. Create a list of unique visitor identifiers – either email addresses, custom identifiers, or auto-generated random identifiers – to specify who should have access to your waiting room. You distribute these links via email or make the links available only once visitors have logged into their profiles. Visitors then access the waiting room by using the link with their unique identifier.
The invite-only waiting room allows you to validate all traffic before it enters your website, helping you reward loyal customers and prevent bots from abusing your sales or registrations.
24/7 protection
Enterprises use this implementation pattern as a safety net to mitigate unexpected traffic surges and for protection during high traffic peaks all year round.
With the 24/7 protection implementation, traffic levels on the covered site or page(s) are constantly monitored. If traffic inflow exceeds the thresholds you configure, only then will the online queue activate.
The visitors would be placed in the waiting room in a standard first-in, first-out order. When the waiting room is empty, Queue-it will switch off the virtual waiting room and no visitors will see a waiting room page until traffic inflow again exceeds your configured thresholds.
How actually Virtual Waiting Rooms work
When excessive traffic is detected, users are directed to the waiting room instead of being allowed to access the site.
The online waiting room is a static web page that displays the user's place in the queue in real-time, and provides an estimate for when the user will reach the front of the queue. When it is the user's turn to access the site, they will then be able to enter and complete their transaction.
https://www.trafficdefender.com/ How it works
Randomization vs FIFO (first in first out) strategies
By default a virtual waiting room operates on a first-in, first-out basis. However, if visitors arrive early to a sale or registration, they are placed in a pre-queue.
Visitors in the pre-queue see a countdown to the start of the sale or registration. Once the sale or registration starts, those early-comers in the pre-queue are randomized, and from that point on anyone else who joins the waiting room will be put at the back of the queue in a first-come, first-served order.
A pre-queue prevents website crashes from early demand and delivers online fairness.Without the pre-queue, the start of the sale or registration would artificially move earlier and earlier. For example, consider a concert ticket sale that starts at 10am. If someone showing up at 9:30am gets a prioritized spot in line, what’s to stop someone from arriving at 9am, or 7am, or the day before?
The pre-queue also neutralizes the advantage that visitors with fast internet or bots with speedy scripts would otherwise receive by arriving seconds before a sale or registration.
An improved user experience
The Virtual Waiting Rooms can be customized to fit our branding. And to display relevant information like position in the queue, estimated waiting time, a progress bar and remanning availability to the user, improving the user experience and they need to wait due to a high traffic.
Take a look at this Queue Fair demo:
Platforms with this technology we can integrate into our websites
These are some examples, there are others out there and pricing vary a lot.
In conclusion, virtual waiting rooms are useful for managing website traffic during high-demand situations. They can be used to ensure fair access to sales or registrations, prevent website crashes due to high traffic, and improve the user experience by providing relevant information such as position in the queue and estimated wait time.
If you are interested in knowing more about this technology, don’t hesitate in contact us at herwin.tech, we will be delighted to help you