How does a Virtual Waiting Room work?

A Virtual Waiting Room is a page that holds visitors away from a busy website, and feeds them back to the protected website at a rate it can handle while still maintaining responsiveness and performance. This means websites can handle unexpected or sudden peaks in traffic without website crashes, and without having to waste energy powering additional servers when things are not busy, so it's green tech too when implemented well.

Fair Virtual Waiting Rooms pass visitors back in First-Come, First-Served order. A good Virtual Waiting Room should also keep the visitor fully informed of their progress and remaining wait. There's nothing worse for your business than a crashed site.

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Our Happy Clients Say

‘Queue-Fair is a Lifesaver! It was fast and simple to start working with them. Sooo fast and simple - 2 steps 1 day! Massive presale events used to make our site collapse, now people get into a virtual line - very efficient. I recommend Queue-Fair to others, without doubt!’

Gisella Galati

President & Cofounder TicketShow

‘A big Thank You for turning our enquiry around so quickly. Emailed at 9pm Wednesday, received a fully branded Queue page ready to use at 11am Thursday. Simply brilliant! The dashboard and features are great - really intuitive, really clean and easy to use. We queued over 22,000 people for our product launch event at a cost that was extremely competitive. Thanks so much for everything! I'm really happy to give Queue-Fair a glowing testimonial and would recommend them to any business who needs a queue system for their event or promotion.’

Steve Keatley

Head of eCommerce Beauty Works

‘The communication was really smooth and everything worked well. The campaign was a success - we were in the green zone with our server all the time! It all worked, both technical and customer-side, and we got positive feedback. We recommend you contact Queue-Fair! I'm pleased we found the solution to our problems.’

Riho Maisa

CEO Veebipoed

‘We run an online booking site for athletic events. We needed a solution that would help us cope with the load of lots of people trying to be the first to book. Queue-Fair's PreSale page held the load away from our servers before the bookings opened, and then placed people fairly into an online queue, feeding the visitors back to our site at the rate we chose. The solution and support is excellent, perfect for our needs and at an affordable cost too. We're delighted with the system and it's full of useful features, like the capability for people in the queue to switch devices without losing their place. Our visitors even tell us this is a good idea to control the traffic to our site. Having started with a specific event, we are now happily protecting our whole site with Queue-Fair.’

Phil Howard

CEO BookItZone

‘Superb! User friendly, easy to set up and get going - and superb business communication! Queue-Fair works great when things heat up, and helps reduce the load of the ticketing website. By building Queue-Fair with ease of use in mind, it enabled the support team to use it - no devs required!’

Joel Eliasson

Head of Customer Success Nortic

What Queue-Fair offers you

Satisfaction

High-profile crashes don't just harm your servers, they harm your reputation. Protect your customers' good will with a smooth branded journey.

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Satisfaction

Show your customers that fairness matters with our original first-in, first-out Virtual Waiting Room technology. Start experiencing the benefits of queue psychology, and find out how social proof can increase your sales.

Manage any situation

Time-limited sales and one-off events

You've probably noticed the high traffic that happens at your site before your tickets even go on sale, as keen buyers rush to your website to be the first to buy. We help you cope with these kinds of peaks too by giving you a PreSale Page, with a nifty countdown clock.

Viewers on the PreSale page automatically go through to the queue when the sale opens, optionally with a random position so that all visitors who arrive before a queue opens are treated equitably and fairly.

If that sounds like what you want, then we also ensure that people who don't see the PreSale page because they arrive after the sale has opened are served on a first-come, first-served basis - but behind those who have seen the PreSale page and are online and ready to buy at opening time.

Whatever method you choose, our system targets the desired flow rate (users per minute) to your website or e-commerce platform when deciding when to put through the next person in line. You specify the flow rate and can make the queue go faster or slower instantly at any time. Unlike Virtual Waiting Rooms from some other providers, so long as there are buyers online, you'll never find yourself waiting for customers to arrive.

When you're at the end of your sale, with just a few items left in timing-out baskets, you can even let buyers through from the front of the queue one at a time with our unique Admit One button, so you can safely and completely sell out your stock in one sales event, avoiding the twin risks of selling more stock than you have available, and the risk of having unsold items from abandoned shopping baskets left over at the end.

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Choose your Opening Time

Queue-Fair protects your site from crashing from people hitting refresh, refresh, refresh before the sale starts, as well as controlling the flow of visitors during your online event.

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Seasonal Peaks and Unexpected Surges

Queue-Fair only queues visitors to your website in a Virtual Waiting Room when needed, in order to prevent the flow rate exceeding the limit you specify. You can easily install the Queue-Fair Adapter on every page of your website to defend against sudden spikes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.25 days a year. The Queue will turn on automatically if more visitors arrive than the threshold you choose, which you can change instantly any time.

Queue-Fair gives you peace of mind that your website will not crash under high demand. You can choose whether to protect your whole site, or just the pages that you expect to be busy, allowing other visitors to use the rest of your site without seeing a queue.

Our versatile Dynamic Targeting system means we can also ensure that every user gets back from the Virtual Waiting Room to wherever he or she is expecting to go - even if they all want different pages. You don't need to set up a separate queue for every page when just one Virtual Waiting Room protects your back end processes, whichever page on your site gets busy.

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Turns On Automatically Exactly When Needed

The queue will automatically start showing queue pages to visitors the very moment that traffic exceeds the SafeGuard Rate that you specify in the Queue-Fair Portal, without delay.

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Customers use our Virtual Queue technology for

Hot ticket sales events

Seasonal and daily peaks

Regular events like Black Friday

Handling the unexpected

Focused protection for your bottlenecks

Not all web pages are created equal. Your web server can serve basic 'flat' content most easily. It has a harder job serving up database content like product pages or personalized content like shopping carts, but the trickiest job of all is handling the checkout and payment process - and if you have too many people trying to do this at the same time, that results in a crashed site. While of course you can use an easy simple single Queue-Fair Virtual Waiting Room to protect all these steps in your process, many websites prefer to focus on the final bottleneck at the end.

We can even take information regarding product choices from your systems as you pass your users into the Virtual Waiting Room, and pass it back to you as they come back - it's easy.

Not sure what's right for you? Ask us for a performance review of your website and we'll be happy to nail down any unknowns you may have.

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Every transaction has a slowest step

Even with fast webservers, your order processing systems and database functions will slow with too many people. Queue-Fair protects your system and your visitors.

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Brand Power

You can brand your Queue Pages using any pictures, assets, text or style you like.

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Show a smoothly branded experience

There's nothing more damaging to your brand than a crashed site or error message or - even worse - Refresh, Refresh, Refresh when people are trying to buy. Uniquely in the industry, Queue-Fair allows you complete control over your Virtual Waiting Room, with full access to the HTML of your queue pages, so you can change them however you like.

We'll provide you with example text that you can edit as you choose, and you also control colors, styling imaging and backgrounds - all without sacrificing performance in any way.

Because you have control of the HTML of pages, anything that can be shown on a web page can be shown to visitors while they queue. Want to add a video? It's easy. A slideshow of your products? That's a snap too. The only limit on what you can show on your your Queue Pages is your imagination.

While your users are in the Virtual Waiting Room this is also a marketing opportunity for you; you can even push live messages if you like. Increase customer faith and satisfaction in your brand with Queue-Fair, rather than damage your reputation with a website crash.

Queue across phones, tablets, laptops, desktops and even your call center.

Our Virtual Waiting Room works brilliantly on all screen formats. Want a notification sent to your users when they reach the front of the queue? No problem! Want callers to your phone line to have their place saved online? We can even do that too.

Your visitors have the comfort of knowing their place in the queue has been saved no matter what device they are using, and even if they switch devices while in the Virtual Waiting Room. If the wait is going to be long why not tell them to relax, have a cup of tea and come back when they are ready to be served; no-one loses their place in a Queue-Fair queue.

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Fully Responsive

Our Queue Pages look great on any screen size.

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Personalized Content

Automatically show queue pages customized for each visitor or tailored to the specific pages on your site they wish to see.

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Automatic Tools for Dynamic Queue Pages

Run an event website and don't want the hassle of creating a new queue for every new event? No problem! Queue-Fair can protect your whole site and all the events you run with a global queue, and automatically brand and style the Queue Pages your visitors see on-the-fly for each of your separate events - without you having to lift a finger, or even use an API. Change the wording, style, content, images or any other aspect of your Queue Pages to match the specific event or page on your website that each individual visitor wants to reach. It's completely automatic! Each visitor sees a page that is tailored to the event they were trying to access when they were sent to queue - or even provide each visitor with individual content that's personalized to them - it's all up to you!

Our unique dynamic system is effortless, automatic and you don't even need to login to the Portal when you create a new event - just add your event to your site as you would normally do. Contact us to find out more about this unique hassle-eliminating, time-saving feature, only from Queue-Fair.

What about the tech?

Queue-Fair does not operate as a DNS or reverse proxy. Rather, think of it as a page from us inserted between two pages from you. We have the most flexible implementation in the business and are happy to customize for you - our entire product suite is the result of many years of such interactions.

Whether you are protecting a whole site or a single page, an app screen or an NFT drop, Queue-Fair has the solution that is right for you.

You can send visitors into a Queue-Fair Virtual Waiting Room with a direct link, or with client-side javascript (which many customers find the simplest way), with Network-Edge code at your CDN provider, or with server-side code.

We have pre-written adapters for every major web programming language and app development platform, but if you find your tech isn't listed just ask and we'll make one for you.

We are also happy to do remote installations for you if you like, as part of your Free Trial.

Unlike some providers who use queue servers that are not under their direct control, we use dedicated queue VMs with a High Availability Active/Active architecture - so traffic for your account is distributed across several live machines. Virtual machines in our core database clusters are also Active/Active Master/Master replicated. This means we can perform maintenance on any machine in our solution without dropping a single request or record, including our database machines. Our patented method also means machines in our database clusters are never under load no matter how busy your queue may get. We don't believe any other Virtual Waiting Room provider can say the same.

Our maximally efficient patented queue process means we can queue millions of people at the same time on each Queue Server in each Queue Server Cluster, and it's all protected by an ultra-high-availability world-wide distributed Google Cloud Load Balancer with Google Cloud Armour.

Queue pages, assets, settings and scripts - the browser files that make up your queue page display and integrate with your web pages - are served by Google CDN - fast, reliable and speedy from Google's Edge Network anywhere in the world. We've chosen a CDN method that does not require auto-scaling - it's unlimited hits all the time - so we instantly respond to massive increases in hits per minute. We tested this ourselves with an industry-standard load testing tool and couldn't so much as dent the performance even with millions of requests per minute and zero ramp-up time. If you would like to run your own load tests, let us know, and we'll set you up with a Free Trial.

All display assets are distributed worldwide within 30 seconds of being added in the Portal, so static content for your pages, your queue page layouts and queue settings for integration are always fresh and delivered instantly. It's all easily managed with the drag-and-drop File Manager in the Queue-Fair Portal, which handles CDN deployment for you automatically, securely and effortlessly.

With close to two decades in the business, we are also used to fulfilling the more stringent uptime and networking requirements of voice solutions, which are much higher than the standard normally required of websites and SaaS solutions. You should expect to find our service as reliable as Google.

The Queue-Fair Portal

Full Control at Your Fingertips

Install Queue-Fair on your whole site by adding a single line of Adapter code to your website pages, or install a Server-Side Adapter on your website, or a Network-Edge Adapter at your CDN or cloud provider for the most secure queues in the business.

Once that's done, it's fire-and-forget technology - new queues are added, existing queues are reconfigured and Queue Pages are fully customized with our easy-to-use Queue-Fair Portal. There's a wealth of historical and real-time Queue statistics too.

Uniquely within the industry, we give you full access to the HTML code for the Page that is shown to your queued visitors, so you can make your pages look however you want, and say what you want them to say. You also get a hosted filespace for images and supporting files used by your Queue Pages, so people in the queue are never placing load on any of your servers, all managed online through the Portal with our handy File Manager.

Want to keep things simple? Each new Queue Page starts with our default HTML, which contains a logo, a favicon and recommended messaging - or you can Clone any page that you have already created. You can brand up quickly by simply replacing these assets with your own assets, and hey presto! It's your logo that's shown. Next set the colors and font for your Queue Page to match your site where indicated in the Portal Page Editor. Finally, and optionally, you can edit the page text to say whatever you want it to say; it's a snap! It's so easy and quick to do that we are also happy to do this for you as part of your Free Trial.

Use the Queue-Fair Portal to easily manage the Activation Rules that determine which pages on your site may present a Queue when things get busy - once the Adapter is added to your pages or webserver, you don't need to modify your code when your business needs change.

Running the same site with different brands, or need to queue in multiple languages? No problem - just add a Queue Page Variant and your visitors will see different visual treatments for the same queue. Pages can even be customized with personalized content dynamically on the fly with Queue-Fair too.

How does a Virtual Waiting Room work?

It's easy as 1,2,3...

Enter Website

Queue Fairly

Complete Transaction

Our Happy Clients Say

What Queue-Fair offers you

Manage any situation

Time-limited sales and one-off events

Choose your Opening Time

Seasonal Peaks and Unexpected Surges

Turns On Automatically Exactly When Needed

Customers use our Virtual Queue technology for

Queue-Fair gives you peace of mind

Focused protection for your bottlenecks

Every transaction has a slowest step

Brand Power

Show a smoothly branded experience

Queue across phones, tablets, laptops, desktops and even your call center.

Fully Responsive

Personalized Content

Automatic Tools for Dynamic Queue Pages

Check out Virtual Waiting Room branding options now.

What about the tech?

Want to know how Queue-Fair works?

The Queue-Fair Portal

Website falling over? Put a stop to that now!

Related Articles

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Why accuracy matters for a Virtual Waiting Room

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Beating Sneaker Bots, Ticket Bots, Scalpers and Touts

Virtual Waiting Rooms for eCommerce - avoid ecommerce website crash

How does too much traffic crash a website?

Why use a rate based Virtual Waiting Room?

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