Why use a virtual waiting room?
Offload excess traffic on your website by redirecting users to a waiting room page. Users are queued on a first-in, first-out basis and sent back onto your site at a manageable rate, keeping your servers running at peak performance.
CrowdHandler takes care of detecting unusual traffic patterns and helps you to schedule online waiting rooms for drops and flash sales. The performance of your site is continually monitored, optimising the queue length. CrowdHandler can detect bot traffic and suspicious behavior both in the queue and on your site, and provides tools for banning bad actors, ensuring fairness for your customers.
Make it your own
Customize your waiting room templates to match your brand, or products. You have complete control of the layout, content and language of your waiting room, and you can message the users in the queue at any time. Out of the box we show:
- Queue position
- Estimated wait time
- Progress bar
- Remaining availability
But if you don’t like one of those, or you want to add something of your own, it’s up to you.
Room to expand
Flash sale? Schedule a waiting room in advance so you can count down to your drop.
Lots on offer? Split traffic across multiple queues, so that you’re not keeping your best customers waiting behind fair-weather fans.
Looking for always-on protection? Set up a safety-net waiting room to avoid nasty surprises.
Master your domain
Multiple websites to protect? No problem.
Need to try something out on a test domain? Go ahead. Your CrowdHandler account can manage multiple domains from one control panel, giving you traffic data, performance information and flow control over each one.
No more bum notes
You queue customers to turn unpredictable spikes into a steady rate of manageable traffic. But what if you don't know what rate is manageable? Set it too high and your website will crash anyway; Too low and your queue grows needlessly.
You could invest in load testing to find the optimum rate, but what if your development team constantly push new code, or your website just behaves differently on Friday mornings?
Autotune to the rescue; We'll continually monitor your page performance, and adjust the rate in real time, optimizing the queue length. Perfect harmony.
VIP treatment
Who likes queueing?
We do — we’re British — but if your customers appreciate the finer things in life, then they’ll probably expect priority access. Set up priority groups for your most loyal customers, and send them a code so they can jump the queue. You can use generic voucher codes, or single-use, personal ones. You can have more than one priority group per room too. So reach out to those fan clubs and loyal customers and remind them they’re special.
Vanquish Villains
Use our firewall to analyse the IPs using your rooms, and block the bots slowing down your genuine users. Use Captchas and anomaly detection to mitigate bots. We’ll flag known threats and automatically block IPs that are taking up too many positions in the queue. On the flip-side, set your own IP to ‘ignore’ to skip the line. If you know your big corporate client’s IP range, set it to ‘prioritize’ so they get pushed right to the front. And set your web developers to ‘bypass’ so they can test your backend without getting snarled up in the queue.