So, how can vendors protect themselves from shopping outages due to massive spikes in Black Friday and Cyber Monday web traffic, and make the most of all the potential customers?
With Black Friday traffic reaching new heights every year, businesses cannot afford to leave anything to chance. Website performance is critical during this high-stakes shopping period, and hoping that your systems can handle the load is simply not enough.
For eCommerce websites, ensuring smooth operation on Black Friday weekend means staying ahead of the curve with traffic management strategies. This includes load testing, upgrading infrastructure, and preparing scalable solutions to manage traffic surges without website slowdowns or crashes. Your online store needs to process payments continuously, even during peak demand, ensuring that all potential customers can complete their purchases without frustration.
Businesses that understand the stakes know the importance of testing systems to simulate the anticipated traffic peaks. By reinforcing your infrastructure, increasing server capacity, and improving elasticity, you’ll ensure that your website performs seamlessly under the weight of Black Friday’s demand. Don’t leave it to chance—be proactive in preparing your systems so your customers can shop and spend with ease.
Here are the usual tips, suggestions and advice:
- Stress test sites to anticipate what they can safely manage.
- Build extra server space into homebuilt infrastructures.
- Employ additional developers on your team to monitor and manage the increased traffic and perform emergency maintenance and repairs.
- Upgrade cloud-based infrastructures to cater for traffic spikes and manage scalability.
A strong preparation strategy ensures you stay ahead of the competition during high-traffic events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. While it’s impossible to predict every outage or spike in demand, a surge of customers flocking to your site—especially after a competitor crashes—can throw your website into chaos. Ensuring that your system can handle such situations is essential, as Black Friday could be the highest-traffic event of the year for your business.
That’s where a reliable virtual waiting room comes in. By implementing the original and patented Virtual Waiting Room, you’re able to manage the flow of visitors smoothly, ensuring a fair and stress-free experience for all your customers, even during peak demand periods. It’s not just about having a queue —it’s about keeping the process seamless and efficient, minimizing downtime, and maximizing sales potential, especially when customers are eager to grab the best Black Friday deals.
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.
Our answer, we’re happy to say, is as safe as they come and oh so easy to implement on any e commerce website.
When Black Friday and Cyber Monday traffic floods your website, Queue-Fair steps in to filter the overflow, guiding excess visitors into a secure virtual waiting room. This ensures your website can handle high volumes without slowing down or crashing. As visitors are gradually brought back to your site, they experience no loss in performance, making their shopping journey seamless and hassle-free.
Each digital waiting room is simple yet effective, featuring a progress bar, an estimated wait time, and a real-time count of how many people are ahead in the queue. This transparency keeps customers informed and reduces anxiety. You can also customize the display to match your brand’s style, highlighting special Black Friday deals or Cyber Monday specials. With your logo proudly displayed, customers feel they haven’t left your website, enhancing brand consistency.
Visitors will always know their position in the queue, how many people are ahead, and how long until they can access the site. With all this information at their fingertips, confusion is minimized, and stress is alleviated. Additionally, use the Queue Page to explain the reasons for the wait—whether it’s a surge in demand for a new product or high traffic during peak hours. Plus, a well-placed message about your deals can keep them engaged and eager to return when their turn comes. A bonus for you: customers in a queue tend to spend 20% more per visit, as the waiting time increases the perceived value of the shopping opportunity.
How to prepare for Black Friday and Cyber Monday demand - simply add our virtual waiting room to your website
Getting started with Queue-Fair is quick and easy—just a single line of code, and your system will be up and running. Whether you’re new to virtual queuing or you’ve used similar solutions in the past, our tech teams are ready to assist with the setup. If you’re not entirely sure about some aspects of the implementation, we’re always on hand to help you out.
If you prefer a hands-off approach, our free trial includes remote installation, where our tech experts handle the setup for you. However, if your IT department would like to take the reins, the installation process is simple enough for them to handle. It usually only takes a couple of minutes, and the setup is straightforward, ensuring you can get started without any delays.
Queue-Fair isn’t like a traditional DNS or reverse proxy solution. Instead, it’s a page inserted between your busiest locations on the site, giving you flexibility in how it integrates with your existing infrastructure. This unique setup allows you to choose the optimal configuration that works best for your business, whether you want it fully automated or more tailored to specific customer satisfaction goals.
One of the key benefits of using Queue-Fair is its ability to manage heavy traffic loads without overloading your servers. By filtering excess visitors into a virtual waiting room, you can keep your website running smoothly during those traffic surges, ensuring a better experience for your customers. This also means that any investment in PPC ads or social media marketing won't go to waste, as your site will be prepared for the increase in visitors.
How confident can you be in our ability to handle massive traffic spikes? Queue-Fair leverages the power of Google’s reliable infrastructure. Our most powerful server, hosted on Google Cloud, can handle over 300 million customers in a single queue. If that’s not enough, we automatically scale by adding more queue servers to handle even higher demand, ensuring that you don’t experience any slowdowns.
With Queue-Fair, scalability is never a concern. We can handle global demand, managing every person with an internet connection in a single queue. If you ever encounter a truly out-of-this-world situation, such as an alien invasion where extraterrestrials want to join your queue, we can scale our service to accommodate that too. Rest assured, your infrastructure is in good hands with Queue-Fair’s robust and scalable system.
What makes our system so great?
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.
- Protects entire websites or single pages and events
- Fully customisable with your brand colours, style, and logo
- First come, first served, completely fair system
- Fully automated
- Intuitive easy-to-use Portal tools for reporting and managing your queues
- Completely secure
- The most accurate system of any of our competitors
- Advanced bot filter tools prevent abuse and ensure only real people enter each queue
- Each visitor sees a page tailored to their event or product
- Create and deliver personalised content for each queue
- Text alerts, emails and app notifications are available for when customers reach the front of their queue
- Queue across multiple devices - switch from phone to tablet to laptop and desktop
- Direct link, server-side code, or client-side JavaScript implementation, network-edge integration, or code-free with Google Tag Manager
- Works with every major web programming language and app development platform
- Completely scalable to handle all the traffic that comes your way - no matter what
- Can manage millions of new customers per minute as standard
- Uses the fastest queue servers on the planet
- Utilises green, sustainable technology, delivering lower hardware, hosting, and energy costs
- Incredible value for money - the lowest price on the market.
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!
Conclusion
Statista revealed that 86% of enterprises suffer downtime costs of over $300k per hour, and Google reports that 53% of mobile visitors abandon a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Can your business afford the risks of Black Friday traffic and website downtime that could leave you vulnerable to sales losses and disconnected customers?
With Black Friday sales surges on the horizon, many websites struggle to handle the traffic, resulting in website crashes, lost revenue, and frustrated shoppers. Failure to manage traffic spikes or provide a smooth customer experience could damage your business’s reputation and lead to significant financial losses.
The most effective solution to ensure your website handles Black Friday deals smoothly and securely is to use Queue-Fair's virtual waiting room. Our online queuing system effectively manages website traffic, providing your customers with a fair access system and eliminating the risks of server overloads while enhancing the shopping experience.
Prepare your eCommerce store for the largest traffic surges of the year. Queue-Fair will keep you protected during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so you don’t miss out on potential sales. Start with a free trial, or reach out for advice on how we can help you handle your website's high traffic while ensuring customer satisfaction and smooth operation throughout the busiest shopping events of the year.
