It’s quite possibly the most popular single shopping day on the calendar, with marketing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday hitting every platform imaginable earlier each year, with the offer of bigger and better value purchases than ever before.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to ensure your website handles Black Friday sales traffic without a hitch in the safest and most secure way possible.
Are consumers finally beating the Christmas rush?
Christmas is the busiest time for retail throughout the year. No surprise there. But, because of the bargains and its proximity to the festive season, Black Friday isn’t just winning sales revenue because of its best deals, but because of the savvy shoppers meeting their Christmas quota early - and even just a few hours saved at Christmas, or avoiding having to go to (or cars park farther from) a physical location (and who loves parking lots?), means more time spent your customer's own home with loved ones.
Despite Christmas shopping putting the ultimate pressure on eCommerce retailers, plenty of shoppers are wise to past errors, from missing out on the gifts their children dreamed of and sobbing about them when they weren’t under the tree on the big day, or just missing out on the best advance deals.
Getting in early to guarantee our families’ ultimate joy is part of the great Christmas contest these days. Nobody wants any blemishes on their Christmas experience, and at all costs. So hitting the online giants with time to spare makes Black Friday - and let’s face it, the whole Cyber Week it’s turning into - the best way to get our holiday season spending off the blocks, and get a good sales deal in to boot.
It’s common knowledge that the rugby-loving fraternity goes crazy for new TVs when the big tournaments are on. Next year, with the iSix Nations coming to our screens throughout the back end of January to the middle of March, it’s perfect timing for electronics stores to up their customer marketing, capitalising on those additional sales for black friday and cyber monday.
The build-up to the first matches will get underway as soon as the first Black Friday ads hit our screens and socials. By the time the competition has got a firm grip on fans, those lucrative black friday deals and discounts should be enough to tip buyers into landing a bigger, better, sharper screen to watch the nations fight it out.
With better sale tech for shopping carts and higher site access expectations from our purchase experience than ever, we’re a society that does its shopping on the fly. With the most extensive shopping experience in the world in our pockets, everything is available for purchase wherever we are this Black Friday.
You only have to check the charts monitoring how we shop, spend our time and money, and the graphs continue to head higher and higher for mobile use. Why not? It’s the most convenient way to snap up bargains we’ve ever had.
Unless, that is, your website crashes from the demand. If your customers can't contact or access your e commerce system on black friday, they can't buy from you, of course. It's that simple - and they will notice and remember you went down.
‘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.’
‘Brilliant. I had a sleepless night worrying the website was going to crash again after the last time we tried to run our popular promotion without Queue-Fair. I'm so delighted to have found your solution. Thanks for your responsiveness - it is hugely appreciated that you got this set up for us in less than a day, and it worked perfectly. Awesome. Lovely stuff. Golden. Thanks again; this means the world to me. I'm going to sleep well tonight. Legendary.’
‘A fabulous virtual waiting room solution with an amazing support team. Queue-Fair is seamless - really easy to set up and configure. For the limited quantity stock we want to sell - and not oversell - the customer experience is completely improved. No more site slow downs or trouble adding to baskets. Perfect. Queue-Fair meant we felt like we were in control on our key trading day Black Friday. The business really likes it. Queue-Fair was really successful, it works really well. Support has been brilliant - every question has been answered super quickly. There are lots of events coming up where we want to use Queue-Fair too.’
‘Perfect service that helped us with our busiest time of year. They were a pleasure to doeal with, providing flexibility where we needed it and excellent support with fast response times. The service precisely fit our needs.’
‘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.’
‘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!’
‘It just works! That was the easiest launch we've had this year by some way. We sold out of our four main products and made 20% more than projected. The queue system enabled people to feel they had more time to shop so they added other items to their basket. Watching our launch in real time has given us a major insight into our future product launches too.’
‘Amazing & Easy Product! Queue-Fair is really beautiful. So easy to set the parameters in real-time, and it's so easy to integrate too. The support is reactive and friendly. I got set up with a Virtual Waiting Room in 15 minutes including settings! So I protect my infrastructure from all these traffic peaks with Queue-Fair.’
‘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.’
‘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!’
‘We are very glad to have Queue-Fair as our Waiting Room partner for the three big iPhone launch events. Our website did not crash! We even went beyond our Sales Target, thanks to Queue-Fair! The Queue-Fair platform is user-friendly - very easy to use - and the data reports gave us meaningful insights for our future projects. We are very happy to have them as our partner :) Queue-Fair will surely be our only Waiting Room recommendation to our dear friends. More power Queue-Fair! Good job!’
‘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.’
Nobody should gamble with Black Friday's high traffic and valuable sales revenue. Neither is it worth hoping for the best, guessing that you’ve probably done enough to safeguard your systems.
As businesses and vendors, you need to ensure your e commerce website handles Black Friday weekend traffic effortlessly, allowing your checkouts to keep taking shopping payments throughout the day and night and your buyers happy and spending, so all your potential customers become actual customers, no matter the demand.
The business and e commerce store operators who have already Googled it know that most focus on being technically prepared. That covers simulating a traffic spike, testing shopping systems, reinforcing infrastructure, bumping up allocation and memory, readying your team, and increasing elasticity so that your website - fingers crossed - stays in one piece when all that extra sales traffic hits your site.
Here are the usual tips, suggestions and advice:
Sadly, even the best crystal balls won’t anticipate every outage. What about when your competitor’s site crashes or runs out of stock? Could the overflow of customers leaving those empty shelves and heading to your site for a better deal cause a sudden spike that stumps your system?
Preparing for Black Friday and Cyber Monday means we should all be ready to handle many more customers than we expect to protect our stores and incomes from disappearing offline - it might be the most traffic you get all year.
So, with no further ado, here’s how to prep for Black Friday with the original and patented Virtual Waiting Room website queuing system, just so you're aware.
When that flood of Black Friday and Cyber Monda traffic heads to your website, Queue-Fair filters the visitors your systems can’t safely manage away from your website into a virtual waiting room. Then, it feeds them back to your site at a rate your system can cope with, with no loss in performance.
In reality, each digital waiting room takes the guise of a simple waiting box with a progress bar, an estimated wait, and a running count of how many people are ahead in the queue - customer information is key - and you can customise the display to highlight your special black friday deals too. Feel free to check out a few examples on our homepage; they’re branded in company colours, matching your brand style, with logos pride of place, so visitors and new customers don’t feel like they’ve left your website.
Each customer is clearly informed of their position in the queue, how many people are ahead of them, and how long it will take until they’re filtered back into the main site - they have all the information they need. Furthermore, you can take advantage of the space to explain why they’re in a queue to eliminate confusion and ease anxiety - perhaps you get incredibly busy at peak times, or there’s higher than expected demand for a new product or ticket release. Remember you can showcase anything of interest on the Queue Page to your interested customers - and here's a trade secret: Our customers tell us that when there is a sales queue, people spend around 20% more per shopping visit. The time spent in the queue increases the perceived value of the shopping opportunity on the site when their turn is called.
It only takes a single line of code to get you up and running, and our tech teams will be more than happy to help. In fact, we’ll help you set up the entire system, and we’re always on hand to help should you have anything else where you’re not entirely 100%.
Our free trial includes a remote installation if you’d rather our tech experts do the heavy lifting for you - although the lifting’s not that heavy - it’s all fairly straightforward for your IT department if you’d prefer to carry out the installation yourself. It usually only takes a couple of minutes.
Our system doesn’t work as a DNS or reverse proxy but as a page inserted between your busiest locations. Implementation is flexible, so you can create the option that works best for you and your customer satisfaction goals.
Moving excess traffic spikes away from your servers means your website doesn't have to cope with the extra loading. Your ppc ads or facebook spend won't go to waste. And why should you be so confident that our infrastructure can manage those heavy traffic loads for you and not collapse under the pressure?
For a start, we use Google's infrastructure to provide our service - and you know how reliable Google is. Our most powerful server on Google Cloud - and we don’t rely on a single server but many - can hold over 300 million customers in a single queue, for example. And if you need more power, we automatically scale by adding more queue servers to each cluster team.
In fact, we can comfortably hold every person with an Internet connection IN THE WORLD in a single queue. And if we were invaded by another planet and our alien brothers and sisters all wanted to join the queue, we can scale our service to handle them, too.
If we were to list all the points that make our system an outright winner, we’d need a lot more room - thankfully, we’ve got plenty of that on our servers! But to get you started, here are a few noteworthy points our customers can’t resist.
Queue-Fair is the original inventor of the Virtual Waiting Room queue system with patents in the UK and many other countries worldwide.
If that doesn’t give you confidence in our super-efficient and secure system - we’re not sure what will!
Statista reported that 86% of enterprises suffered downtime costs of over $300k/hour. In addition, Google tells us that 53% of mobile visitors will leave a page if they have to wait more than 3 seconds. Can you afford to take those kinds of risks that leave you vulnerable to such losses?
With steady surges in Black Friday deals, many websites will suffer simply from failing to have an appropriate plan in place to keep everyone happy and flowing through their eCommerce checkouts, losing precious sales revenue and profit in the process.
It's worth mentioning the best way to ensure your website handles Black Friday deals safely and simply - adding protection to your profits and peace of mind for your customers - is to let Queue-Fair manage it for you.
Prepare your business or e commerce store in advance for the biggest bump in traffic spikes all year by giving us a call or signing up for your free trial - you know it makes sense, we can and will save you - or you can read some more of our recent articles if you would are interested to find out more tips and advice, or if you need more information to decide. Don't forget - we’ll keep you online and selling, no matter how much more traffic comes your way.
Invented and patented in 2004, Queue-Fair is the original Virtual Waiting Room, providing online queue management for busy websites and apps.
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