A pre-queue is what website visitors will enter if they arrive before a sale or registration with a waiting room in place. Pre-queues help manage a build-up of visitors before the sale or registration that can cause a website or app to crash.
For example, if you are releasing a makeup collection at 10:00am, you could schedule a waiting room so that all website visitors arriving between 9:00am and 9:59am enter the pre-queue. The pre-queue page features a countdown timer to the start of the sale or registration, at which point the scheduled waiting room activates.
Pre-queue comprises one of the four life cycle stages of a waiting room. The typical life cycle goes: Idle → Pre-queue → Queue → Post-queue.
When you schedule a waiting room to begin at a specified date and time, you can choose to place all visitors who arrive early into a pre-queue. The pre-queue serves as a virtual holding area, offloading visitors from your website or app infrastructure to minimize strain on your system. Early visitors will see a page with a countdown timer. When the sale or registration starts, visitors are randomized and assigned a position in the waiting room. Visitors arriving after the sale or registration starts get a first-come, first-served place in line.
When running your biggest sales or registrations, the price for website failure is high. You need to get them right.
A pre-queue helps you manage pre-sale build-up on your site. Offloading early visitors from your infrastructure gives you control over online traffic peaks that threaten to crash your site.
A pre-queue neutralizes any advantage to arriving early to your sale or registration. This is a typical tactic used by speedy scalper bots, who arrive seconds before the sale’s start to beat the crowd. The pre-queue removes this attack vector.
That’s because early visitors in the pre-queue are randomized once the sale or registration begins. If they weren’t, the sale’s start time would just be artificially pushed further and further ahead. Randomizing earlycomers is the fairest way of dealing with a line online and giving all visitors a fair and equal shot.
When you have a hyped collection release or limited-inventory product, you want to get the timing just right.
Putting visitors in a pre-queue allows you to upload products or push a landing page to your live environment without access from the general public. You can allow your IT team to bypass the pre-queue and run quality assurance tests on your live site before letting visitors in.
"We used Queue-it to manage a countdown on our webshop, to manage traffic before the event went live, and to manage the load of traffic. We managed for the first time to have zero downtime in a major launch and (after we saw everything was working as intended) be totally relaxed during the event itself."
Marco Jorritsma, Business Process Analyst
