On the first day of Christmas, my truelove sent to me: site crashes, lockouts, too much traffic to cope with, a terrible customer experience, and a massive loss of revenue…
Black Friday looks as though it was as popular as ever in 2024, despite the problems retailers—online and off—have faced over holiday season over a very tricky few years.
Cast your mind back to 2020. The COVID pandemic taught us to rely ever-heavily on our ecommerce websites. It wasn’t only our supermarkets that saw massive spikes in customers choosing safer contactless online shopping. The varying lockdowns and non-essential retail outlet closures taught those who weren’t so savvy with eCommerce that there was a whole new way to get their hands on the goods they needed.
As life has slowly returned to some kind of normal, we’re now facing a new set of problems. Demand is as high as it ever was, higher in fact, but due to transport and supply issues, shoppers face further challenges procuring the items they want and need during holiday season, and even more, meeting their delivery schedules in time for opening presents.
Black Friday deals won’t hold quite the same kind of delivery expectations as our Christmas shopping will, but still drive traffic. We’re all likely to be happier to wait a few extra days (or weeks!) to receive our knockdown or half-price TV, console, mobile device or gadget than we are in holiday season.
But at Christmas? If those gifts aren’t under the tree by the 24th, there’s going to be a lot of broken hearts and tears come Christmas morning.
Despite local and global delivery issues making the news almost daily, many consumers will still leave their shopping until the last minute—we’re just human, after all. Sadly, with that comes more holiday season pressure on an already struggling e commerce system, and all at a time when customers have less time for a slow page load.
According to a Retail Trend Report from Deloitte, online shoppers are likely to increase by 3.3% over the festive season of 2024. That's a lot of extra website traffic, to massively boost sales - if you can handle the holiday traffic peak - and if you can't, it doesn't matter how good your content strategy or advertising is for your product pages, people won't be able to spend money with your company. The survey (carried out in the US and UK) showed that customers are unlikely to change their shopping habits during the holidays despite the global supply chain issues that suppliers and logistics companies face today.
Ecommerce is becoming a mighty battleground for retailers on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the entire Christmas shopping season.
With fewer items available from each retailer during holiday season, thanksgiving or other holidays, our online shoppers are likely to be on a wilder hunt than ever for this year’s latest must-have gifts, spending time online jumping from retailer to retailer to snap up those last few gold-dust purchases from businesses, increasing website traffic, especially more traffic from mobile devices.
Will that affect the amount of website traffic that hits our e commerce stores? You bet it will.
We used to believe that Amazon controlled everything and anything online shopping. Yet, as research from groups including Conductor shows, customers are heading for specific sellers instead of running straight to the all-encompassing giant. And if they don’t have the items that they’re looking for? Well, it’s on to the next. And the next. And the next…
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘Communication and the easy use of Queue-Fair's platform really make the product outstanding. We needed a queue for a particularly busy event on our website, and I could see it in real-time, make changes effectively and make sure our website wasn't going to crash. Whenever I had questions or needed support, they were very helpful. I definitely recommend the platform and service.’
‘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!’
‘Everything worked perfectly! I'll use it each time we get a traffic spike to not lose any visitors. Queue-Fair is the cheapest solution on the market. Literally few min to install. Great support and really good reactivity. Easy to edit pages. Best bang for your bucks you can get to handle your critical event, I was able to handle more than 10,000 visitors traffic spike from TV show flawlessly.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘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.’
‘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!’
If you’re an online retailer, are you ready for massive online retail traffic from social media, organic traffic, or search engine optimisation? Can your system safely manage the vastly increased numbers of holiday visitors we’re expecting to see as we hit December and for the rest of the month? Or are you crossing your fingers your existing purchase systems won’t be stretched to breaking point during world holiday shopping season?
When it comes to increased web traffic from holiday visitors and bandwidth issues, several practices can help ease the pressure of more internet traffic and provide your users with a better experience as they purchase, keeping customers happy and informed and keeping hold of the sales you depend on.
You could upgrade your website in late november or early december to manage bigger numbers, adding more christmas holiday traffic capacity when you need it—but do you know how much you’re likely to need and what that costs?
Alternatively, you could take advantage of content distribution networks or compression filters. They could help, or you could add a simple, single line of JavaScript to organise all of your overflow christmas traffic into a neat and orderly queue.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, the good news is, it is.
Queue-Fair offers retailers an off-site virtual waiting room — a neat and ordered queuing system that’s fair, fast, and great for business. When your website isn’t under pressure, you won’t even know it’s there. When it is, it’ll save your site from unwanted crashes, failed search traffic, slow-downs, lock-ups, and lost sales.
Here’s how it works:
Traffic flows into your website. If everything is okay, life carries on as usual. However, if you’re close to your traffic limit, new users will be filtered away from your website into a first-come, first-served queue until it’s their turn to return to your website and complete their purchase.
What’s better, those customers are continually informed of every detail and data they need—from their position in the queue to the time until they'll flow back into the site. What’s better still, with so many customization options, you can use that time to upsell or introduce your queue to associated items and more must-have special offers on your sites.
Before you know it, they’re back on your site with a full basket, and everyone’s managed to stay calm, collected, and comforted.
For those who don’t know what that is, it’s the period of highly-anticipated heavy traffic where engineers and managers are reluctant to update or alter their websites in case teething problems and testing causes a drop in traffic or unseen issues from unexpected bugs and setbacks.
With that in mind, most updates typically scheduled for cyber monday sales or December are held back until January, when there’s a lot less to lose with far lower traffic and sales stakes on the table - though christmas day itself remains a low traffic day.
Queue-Fair doesn’t add any complicated and troublesome updates to your website—all it takes is a single line of JavaScript, easy to add to any wordpress site or other web platform in seconds.
For those who want more control, it offers server side integration, but to get you through the frantic, festive period, all it takes is a simple, single line of code and your chrismas traffic business problems are solved, keeping you ahead of the market competition while you can focus on relaxing through the holiday.
For online retailers who want to create an effective and structured solution to that extra, expected traffic, Queue-Fair delivers the peace of mind you need for all the holiday seasons to come, as well as the peace and goodwill of the holiday period.
This article first published at Smart Retail Tech.
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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