More traffic = More sales
More sales = More profit
Simple huh?
But what else does more traffic mean?
Well, it means there’ll be more pressure on your servers, your payment gateways and your eCommerce administration, leading to overloaded websites and apps, resulting in slow performance, and ultimately, crashing your overwhelmed e commerce site completely.
If we’re continually looking into ways to drive more and more traffic into our online stores, to boost sales and profits without considering the pitfalls, are we just setting ourselves up for a fall? Well, without the right solutions in place, that’s precisely what’s going to happen.
If you sold 20,000 tickets for an event in a venue that only held 200 people, you know exactly how unhappy your customers would be and what their resulting e commerce behavior might look like. The same goes for flooding an ecommerce website with visitors it can’t cope with or isn’t built to handle.
There’s far more to consider than the repair bill. The technical issues cost of getting your ecommerce website or app back up and running is probably the least costly of all the related losses resulting from such an issue.
Ask yourself this. You want to buy a new computer, but a few things are a problem at the checkout and get kicked right back to the beginning of the customer journey. You’d jump ship, right? Go to an e commerce competitor whose site works seamlessly.
It doesn’t stop there, though, does it? Chances are, you won’t go back to the original vendor because you’ve already decided they’re not worth the hassle. Think of the lost revenue from years of subsequent orders from returning customers? What about the spontaneous sales from email campaigns you won’t receive? Or how about the missed orders that may have come from word of mouth or referrals from social media channels?
The revenue loss from missed sales during the downtime of an eCommerce site crash estimates at around 25% of the total loss of all associated costs of website crashes.
When you think eCommerce sites can lose hundreds of thousands of pounds or dollars in any given crash, just think of the total loss that downtime will cost the organization over the long-term when your website crashes.
‘Queue-Fair is great for our large online retail event. It came across as very intuitive to use and worked absolutely fine. Queue-Fair provides continuity and increases confidence for customer online experience. We definitely have plans for Queue-Fair in the future for events where we are expecting a huge deluge of traffic and participation in larger retail events.’
‘Our website and services could not satisfy the peak demand of our offers. Queue-Fair saved our bacon! Straightforward to understand and easy to implement, with great support throughout the process. We can now run our campaigns reliably, confident that our website will cope.’
‘Excellent support. Our business has complex commercial demands and the high traffic to our site at specific times and dates was causing huge problems. Queue-Fair now manages these effectively and we have control of the flow of sales. The immediate support available over the phone is brilliant - the Queue Fair team has gone out of their way to problem solve and assist.’
‘I love it when stuff just works. Everything has to be right first time - and with Queue-Fair it was! It does what we wanted it to do and it did it well. It meant one less thing to worry about on what was hitherto a stressful day, and that was worth the price of admission alone. I contacted a non-UK company and they just bombarded me with calls, but Queue-Fair got us all the way from initial contact to full live deployment in less than two hours - on a Saturday! I'm very impressed - deliriously happy and ecstatic. Our social media interactions went up 800%. Perfect. Excellent. The person that invented this is a genius!’
‘Reduced the stress of our online store launch day! We launched a brand new website on the same day that we opened for orders this year. Launch day provides a huge rush of customers to our website and having Queue-Fair in place helped us to feel at ease throughout this experience. We received zero emails from customers about the queue (which we attribute as a sign that it was all working well). The queue was easy to integrate into our website. Our experience with the Queue-Fair team was smooth and professional, and best of all our customers had a great experience! We appreciated the peace of mind that having Queue-Fair provided.’
‘Excellent service. We use Queue-Fair monthly and it has been working great. We called Queue-Fair on Sunday evening because we were doing a drop. They answered immediately and solved the problem within five minutes! They saved our drop and did everything very quickly!’
‘Queue Fair is a robust and user-friendly solution to handle expected and unexpected peaks in visitor numbers. The guidance and communication with the team were very pleasant; our questions were answered promptly. It's reassuring to know that we can always apply a management measure by activating Queue Fair to handle unexpected high loads of visitor numbers. There are no downsides of using Queue-Fair.’
‘An easy-to-use tool and a responsive team. Every Saturday we offer a limited number of products for pre-order, creating a massive and rapid overload of the server. We had to find a solution to absorb the traffic and make our customers' shopping experience more fluid. The tool was easy to set up on my website. Their documentation is complete and accurate. ’
‘The perfect solution for the release of our limited edition figurine! Queue-Fair is very easy to implement and we were well supported and guided in setting up the parameters. The real-time reporting is great and allows us adjust our parameters during the event without crashing our server. We are very satisfied and plan to use Queue-Fair for our future releases.’
‘Perfect solution for our Shop. Perfect service, they answered my mail even in the night! Best service I encountered over the last years. Impressive fair pricing! We're more than happy with the service. We usually get high peaks of users every once in a while, with Queue-Fair we finally could manage to get our servers stable again and the selling process is just perfect.’
‘No nonsense, cost effective queuing system that works. Queue-Fair has helped us both with specific product launches and day-to-day traffic peaks. It's working seamlessly for us - when we take a trial of any technology, we look to make sure a) that it works and b) is cost effective, and Queue-Fair is both, and I'm very happy to continue using the excellent service. We looked at several options but Queue-Fair was the clear winner in terms of price, and it's flawless.’
‘Perfect service that helped us with our busiest time of year. They were a pleasure to deal with, providing flexibility where we needed it and excellent support with fast response times. The service precisely fit our needs.’
There shouldn’t be a problem with peak traffic. We should aim to make the most of those periods to drive more potential customers to our e commerce sites, ticket onsales and eCommerce stores. Sadly, as discussed, too much of a good thing can cause serious problems.
There is only so much online traffic any one website host system can comfortably contend with before the website crashes. Overloading to the point of a system fail, crashing out pages, and the ensuing downtime is something to avoid at all costs.
So, how do we do that?
The first thing most of us would think about is increasing the capacity of our website.
That’s great, but if your peak web traffic times happen once a month, during holiday shopping season (and even major retailers struggle with holiday season or a black friday sale), for a product launch or special event booking, then all of that extra digital commerce capacity or upgraded hosting plan is sat doing nothing for the majority of the time.
Yet, throughout the additional time that you continue to pay for those upgrades - more resources aren't particularly cheap at a quality hosting provider. Sadly, it’s still not a complete solution. Even with the best intentions and calculations, you could still suffer a surge of many users so large it sinks your new system and your website crashes anyway.
Do you want to overpay for something that you use so infrequently? We didn’t think so—that’s why we built a better and far more financially viable option.
We spent a lot of time learning about how customers react to waiting, to queuing online and in real life, and the psychology for both turns out to be very similar if you want to avoid giving the wrong impression.
We’ll all wait in line, almost happily, as long as we feel the end justifies the means. For those products that are worth waiting for—then, we’ll wait.
The system fails when we’re left feeling forgotten or that somehow we’ve been lost in the system; that we're going to be hanging on forever, without the results we expect.
Here’s what our online queuing and virtual waiting rooms offer your customers to keep them feeling important and cared for throughout the process.
Keeping your customers informed with constant updates provides the security they need. They’ll see their exact position in the queue, how the line is progressing, and when they’ll reach the top and get to the good stuff. This is almost as important as preventing website crashes in the first place.
By configuring every step in advance, you know how your system will deal with surges and sudden peaks in website traffic. You can be confident that you are taking the best care of your customers in ways to build brand reputation, not destroy it.
Testing your site and its systems will help you determine the limits of your operation. It will also show the points in the sales journey where your virtual queues need integrating. Managing this during a simulation is far better than waiting for the worst-case scenario to kill your servers in real-life. Understanding your site or app’s capacity will determine the optimum configurations for your queues—well within the limits of your system and integration with payment gateways.
So, your customers are happily waiting in line because they can see their progress, and they know their turn is approaching at an appropriate rate. What can you do to improve their user experience and feel further invested in your brand?
Your virtual waiting room gives you an opportunity to cross-sell, up-sell, reward them for their patience, and introduce them to products they might have missed or not considered, all while maximizing website speed. You can entice them to join mailing lists, sign up for discount codes, or become VIP customers.
Now you’re equipped to deal with all the website traffic surges the web can throw at you, nothing is stopping you from driving as much new custom your way as you can. And while your web and app guests are pre-occupied with all the added benefits of choosing your business, they’re not thinking about being stuck in a queue.
This is merely a small selection of benefits for your website's performance during holiday season or other peak times. With a vast list of advantages saving you time, money, and, most of all, customers, our online queuing systems are perfect solutions to avoid ecommerce website crash on your site or mobile app.
Let’s face it, there’s one adage that has served us well for hundreds of years, and in this scenario, it’s just as relevant—prevention is so much better than a cure.
Invented and patented in 2004, Queue-Fair is the original Virtual Waiting Room, providing online queue management for busy websites and apps.
2024 The Fair Queue People Ltd. - All Rights Reserved.
Part of the Orderly family of queue solutions - OrderlyQ - OrderlyStats - WeQ4U
