Virtual waiting rooms and online queuing for queue ticketing

  • Virtual waiting rooms and online queuing for ticketing websites

Landing on a website and immediately feeling disappointed or confused isn't something any online vendor wants for their visitors.

Whether they face an error message, a frozen screen, or other glaring sign that the site has crashed, it's such a huge disappointment for the event or gig-hungry customer. If that wasn't bad enough, it could be financially crippling for so many of the businesses running these sites, those incapable of managing sudden surges of traffic and failing to assign tickets to those customers ready and willing to buy them. Time for a ticket queue management system!

Technical Guide

We regularly look at the problem from the vendor's side of things in terms of customer flow — after all, they're the ones with the most to lose. Today, though, to put the boot on the other foot, we're going to explore what it's like for the site visitor hoping to grab high-demand tickets for the most popular events on the market. Customer satisfaction really matters!

ticket queue management customer satisfaction

Which events and experience are prone to surges in traffic volume?

After a year's worth of major events being taken clean off the table, where large groups once gathered to revel in an exhilarating shared experience, finally, the time is coming to return to life as we knew it.

Unlike retail stores that have continued to be able to sell their products, tickets and tours, if not already, will soon become available again as fans are allowed back into stadiums and arenas. More events will add to the total tally each day, and with them, the problem all fans faced, and that's how to get their hands on the tickets they're the most desperate for.

The anxiety comes not only from if they'll be lucky enough to land the tickets they want but also from the experience of procuring them via online agencies and ticketing systems.

The most popular, and those causing the highest levels of frustration and anxiety, are typically gigs and live music events - these are the highest priority to manage queues. However, the anxiety of online ticket purchasing isn't solely limited to one experience, and there's room to improve the customer experience for:

  • Gigs and tours
  • Music festivals
  • Theatre shows, plays, and musicals
  • Theme parks
  • TV shows, awards ceremonies, and live events
  • Sporting events, games, and matches

Scroll through the established ticketing sites right now, and you'll find that most acts and events remain postponed or cancelled. It's just another frustration for the entertainment-loving gig, concert, and festival-goers — but not for much longer, we hope.

The ‘crash’ and burn for ticketing websites and their visitors

Let's get back to the frustrations of fans landing the tickets they really want.

Established agencies may already have their online ticketing queues in order, but what solution do they do to deliver a straightforward and as near stress-free service as their users would like in their ticket queues? There are means to make the journey more comfortable; we'll look at them after why such stresses appear in the first place.

customer journey ticket queue

How does the fan feel when approaching such an issue?

Stressed. Anxious. Nervous. Excited.

They're all emotions delivered using the same chemicals, but how we interpret them is down to how we feel and what we think about the process and solution. If the process of procuring tickets were guaranteed and seamless, then the excitement would be all we had to face. Sadly, with demand almost always being higher than supply, many fans will be disappointed, and they know it. That anticipation is what delivers the stress of buying the tickets and the anxiety of if they'll be lucky enough to procure them.

Worse still, plenty will feel disappointed even if they win their tickets. And that's down to the buying experience solution.

When more fans log on than a service's servers can comfortably manage, each one over the set limit is placed in a queue before being permitted access to the final stage website or page. Only when they get to the front of the queue can they apply for their allocation of tickets assigned and carry out the purchase transaction.

manage queues ticket queues

The solution: virtual queuing systems that manage traffic overflow and queue ticketing user experience

Filtering heavy traffic loads by moving excess users into a virtual waiting room , they become part of an online queue , and with the pressure on the servers removed, they continue to work as normal at optimum speed.

Fans are added to the queue in order or arrival, delivering a fair first come first served system, adding some sense of relief to the buyer. Believing the system is fair to all in the queue also benefits the waiting journey feel shorter for its users, a more pleasant customer journey - especially when the queue management system shows the number of people ahead of each visitor in real time.

But does that appease the total stress and anxiety of the fan looking to buy tickets? Well, it depends on how the queue is managed.

What our Clients say about Queue-Fair

Quicket

Queue-Fair is a solid platform with great customer service . Their robust and fair queueing system took away a lot of the stress of running a flash sale. There's nothing to dislike! Give it a go, you won't be disappointed.

Michael Kennedy, Director

TicketShow

Queue-Fair is a Lifesaver! It was fast and simple to start working with them. Sooo fast and simple - 2 steps 1 day! Massive presale events used to make our site collapse, now people get into a virtual line - very efficient . I recommend Queue-Fair to others, without doubt!

Gisella Galati, President & Cofounder

Nortic

Superb! User friendly, easy to set up and get going - and superb business communication! Queue-Fair works great when things heat up, and helps reduce the load of the ticketing website. By building Queue-Fair with ease of use in mind, it enabled the support team to use it - no devs required!

Joel Eliasson, Head of Customer Success

Glade Festival

Your software meant that everyone was held in a queue away from our server and allowed a gentle flow of buyers to pass through the system. It was great! Any online store which has a rush of customers would find this really useful. Thanks a million and keep up the good work!

Clappit

Brilliant! We are very happy and satisified with Queue-Fair, it is wonderful to have this level of support. The service is working perfectly - we sold thousands of tickets in no time at all , and Queue-Fair helped us manage traffic during high peaks! We are recommending Queue-Fair to our service partners too. I am really happy!

Lodovico Benvenuto, Founder

Rezolve

Queue-Fair was just what we needed to manage traffic and the support service is great! . The system has worked very well! We looked for several companies and without a doubt we have found the best! Thank you very much, Queue-Fair!

Hernán Bonavota, Software Developer

Can't cloud technology expand its platform when queue surges hit its servers.

One of the questions we're often asked is: if cloud technology is clever enough to read the volume of traffic and expand with it, why should we bother with an online queuing system at all?

Sadly, for the time being, cloud-based scaling isn't an immediate process. It takes a few minutes for the additional server capacity to be activated and prepared in order to be effective. During that time, it's highly likely that your traffic surge will have done its damage and shut your site down, leaving you unable to deliver success.

self service ticket status in the ticket queue

It's a great option to manage a higher rate of traffic and sales, but we'd still suggest that a ticketing queue system is in place to protect you from disaster during those few minutes of vulnerability.

How does the fan feel when faced with a ticketing queue system for concert and event tickets?

How does our existing list of feelings and emotions look when our fans face a virtual queue instead of direct access to their purchase?

  • Anxious that they might not reach the front of the online queue while tickets are still available.
  • Frustrated at not knowing their position or when they might be called on to complete the transaction.
  • Worried that they've been forgotten or lost in the system.
  • Pressured to try another means of acquirement.

There's far less excitement in there and way more anxiety. So how can the sellers go about delivering a better customer experience when they arrive?

retail stores manage queues like ticket queue or queue tickets

Tips to make the queuing experience easier for concert lovers and festival-goers

Here's how to make the best of the situation and to help buyers through the ticketing queue management process with the best experience possible.

It's all boils down to fairness and communication.

  • Be clear about what benefits each fan can expect throughout the process.
  • Let them see the continual movement of their position in the online queue.
  • Update the waiting time until they reach the payment/ordering stage.
  • Help them to feel part of the journey.

The main capability takeaway here is continual feedback . Knowledge is power, as they say.

By keeping your visitors and buyers informed, much of the anxiety about ticket queues is relieved. However, the concern as to whether or not they'll land the tickets they want is still flowing through their veins.

How do you deal with that? To answer that, here's a list of common elements that play their part in those worries abut ticket status. Once you understand them, you can introduce ways to counteract them, bringing peace and harmony to your visitors (well, a little at least), garnering love and respect for your brand. And why is that so important? Repeat sales, customer experience and loyalty, and returning revenue; that's why.

  • Occupied time (active waiting) feels shorter than unoccupied time (passive waiting).
  • Anxiety makes waiting times feel longer.
  • An unknown waiting period feels longer than an estimated, expected duration.
  • Unexplained waiting processes feel longer and are more stress-inducing than explained and accepted reasons.
  • Unfair ticketing queues add to anger and frustration. Fair queuing systems that assign tickets fairly result in more peaceful queuing with greater efficiency.

Creating a distraction to instigate an active waiting period

As we touched on, waiting times feel shorter when we're occupied. So keep your visitors busy, wherever you can.

Active waiting time vs passive waiting time is one of the key ways to fend off your visitors' stresses, so here are a few ways you can keep them distracted.

diverse set of wait times in customer flow for ticket queue

1. Can you keep them busy with quizzes and surveys?

There doesn't have to be a real reason to gather information, but let's say your visitor is buying tickets for a Little Mix show or a play in the West End. While they're nudging their way forward through the online queue and the total waiting time is ticking down, will they even notice if they're clicking through ‘Are you Little Mix's number one fan?’ or ‘How much do you know about the West End theatre trail?’

You could use an integrated survey to gather useful data. What are the things you'd love to determine about your customer experience and how they shop, what they'd love to see on your site or ticket queues, and even find out what would make their waiting and shopping experiences better for each person? It might only take them a few minutes to note their answers, but that could be enough to get them to the front of shorter virtual queues and to the checkout, appeasing their anxieties completely.

ticket queue upsell retail customer flow with automated online appointment

2. Could you upsell other events, concerts, and experiences?

It's also a great opportunity to upsell your service or provide other benefits. While you've got their undivided attention in real time, why not show them all the other events and activities you've got on offer? Extra sales are up for grabs, so you'd be remiss not to try — especially given that the distraction to your customers is buying them a little stress-relief at the same time.

3. Can you bring stages in the buying process forward?

One of the other things ticket buyers want from their buying process or ticket queues is to feel that they're not wasting their time—they want to feel like they've already started. In that case, are there details you can take in advance, moving parts of the process from the final sections to while they're waiting?

Creating an account, adding their address and banking details will help users feel like they've already started the buying process when really, they're still sat in the virtual waiting room. Consider how different that feels to them and how it can change the emotions of their buying experience, as well as increasing efficiency

It's not just about managing traffic and sales; it's about managing the experience for your buyers

Online ticket sales are big business. Using a trusted integrated system for your ticket queues and carrying out all the best practice tips and tricks will make life far better for both vendor and customer. Keeping customers busy during the customer journey solution, keeping them informed, helping them feel safe, and that the whole self service process is fair needs communicating throughout their journey.

Take care of those things, and the sales will take care of themselves. Now all we need is for the gates to the arenas and stadiums to open again.

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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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  • Virtual Waiting Room
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  • How do virtual waiting rooms actually work?
  • Why use a rate-based Virtual Waiting Room?
  • What is a Virtual Waiting Room?
  • An introduction to NFTs and how an NFT queue prevents the dreaded ‘NFT drop’ crash
  • Beating Sneaker Bots, Ticket Bots, Scalpers and Touts
  • Why accuracy matters for a Virtual Waiting Room
  • The psychology of waiting in line (or queuing if you’re British)
  • Scarcity Marketing Strategy and Examples
  • How does too much traffic crash a website?
  • How to Handle Black Friday Traffic
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  • How to choose a virtual waiting room
  • What is an Online Queue?
  • Virtual Waiting Rooms for eCommerce
  • The risks and opportunities of too much website traffic
  • Online Virtual Queuing for eCommerce - how to get it right
  • Types of online queuing systems for virtual waiting rooms
  • Why bigger is not always better
  • Preparing for another frantic festive season

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The comprehensive guide to virtual waiting rooms: all your questions answered.

Green marbles toppling over on one side and lining up orderly on the other

You might not have heard of virtual waiting rooms, but you’ve almost certainly been in one. Virtual waiting rooms empower the world’s biggest businesses—from Ticketmaster to Cathay Pacific to Snipes to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government—to deliver on their busiest days. But what are virtual waiting rooms? How do they work? And why do major businesses and organizations use them? Discover everything you need to know about virtual waiting rooms in this definitive guide.

Table of contents

What is a virtual waiting room, what is the purpose of a virtual waiting room, how do virtual waiting rooms work.

  • Why is there a waiting room on Ticketmaster & other major sites?

What are the benefits of virtual waiting room software?

A virtual waiting room is a cloud-based solution used by businesses and organizations to control online traffic to their websites or mobile apps. It prevents website crashes and ensures fairness in high demand situations like ticket onsales, sneaker drops, and government registrations.

Most people experience virtual waiting rooms as a digital queue. You’ll visit Ticketmaster to get the latest tickets to an event, or Snipes to get some hyped sneakers, or your country’s tax site to file your returns, and you’ll find yourself on a waiting page like the one below.

Virtual waiting room page with key features highlighted

On this page, you’ll see your position in line and your estimated wait time. You can watch the progress bar as you wait or use the email notification feature to get notified when it’s your turn.

When it’s your turn, you’ll be throttled to the webpage or app you were trying to access.

You can watch the typical user experience of a visitor in a virtual waiting room in the video below.

Just like a physical queue, a virtual waiting room is a virtual queue that helps businesses and organizations manage traffic. Managing traffic to websites is important because, just like real-world stores, the experience on the website is improved by limiting the number of people on there at once.

If you’ve seen or taken part in Black Friday sales, you know that a store with too many people in it becomes cramped. People fight over products and push others out of their way. Staff are too busy to assist customers or restock shelves.

Something similar happens when too many people access a website. Some common issues websites and apps suffer due to high traffic include:

  • Servers become overloaded causing slowdowns and/or crashes.
  • Databases become overloaded causing errors in inventory availability and overselling.
  • Third-party features like payment gateways become overloaded causing failed payments and errors at checkout.
  • Other bottlenecks in the user journey, such as search features or “recommended for you” displays, become overwhelmed and fail.
  • As online visitors scramble to get limited-inventory products, tickets, or registrations, the visitors with the fastest internet access or workarounds like bots get an unfair advantage.

An overloaded website is like a store where the front doors haphazardly lock and unlock, the lights flicker on and off, people push past each other to get products, cashiers can’t do their job, and products on the shelves disappear and reappear at random.

A virtual waiting room, like a physical queue, prevents this mess. It keeps the number of people on a site or app at the exact level where a website can perform optimally.

RELATED: How High Online Traffic Can Crash Your Site

Virtual waiting rooms work by automatically redirecting visitors to a waiting room when they perform an action the business wants to manage. This could be accessing the site, accessing a specific landing page, proceeding to checkout, or accessing any other parts of the site that need protection against traffic.

In the waiting room, visitors get a position in the queue. Then, when it’s their turn, they’re automatically throttled back to the site with their unique Queue token which allows them to browse the website without restriction.

While waiting rooms are often customized both in style and in URL to look like the original site, the visitors in them are hosted on the virtual waiting room provider’s servers. This means no strain is placed on the target website’s servers while visitors wait for access.

How do virtual waiting rooms work illustration

Virtual waiting room providers typically have huge amounts of server capacity available to them, but also benefit from holding visitors on a page where they can’t perform complex actions. This means they can comfortably hold just about as many visitors as you want to throw at them.

Queue-it’s virtual waiting room solution, for instance, is hosted on robust and highly scalable AWS servers and uses data centers across Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific.

Queue-it has processed over 50 billion site visits across 10 years and averaged over 50 million visitors per day across 2021. So you can be certain your traffic can be handled by the virtual waiting room solution, no matter how big the event you’re planning is.

Virtual waiting rooms can be configured to work in three key ways, depending on the type of event: (1) the scheduled sale or registration, (2) the safety net, or (3) the exclusive or early access sale.

Discover the virtual waiting room that’s right for you

virtual waiting room guide

The scheduled sale or registration

If you’re holding a scheduled sale or registration, for instance, a product drop , a ticket onsale , or a public service registration that becomes available at a specific time, you can use the virtual waiting room as a pre-queue .

In this use case, when early visitors hit the designated page, they’re redirected to a branded page with a timer that counts down until the sale or registration goes live.

Virtual waiting room pre-queue with sneaker on it and countdown timer

When the timer hits zero, all visitors in the pre-queue are randomized, just like a raffle, and are placed into the queue in their randomly assigned order. Visitors who arrive later are added to the back of the queue and proceed to the event in a first-in, first-out order.

Infographic showing pre-queue, followed by randomization, followed by FIFO queue

Using the virtual waiting room in this way allows you to capture hype before the event and deliver fairness during the event by removing any unfair advantages that might come from people using speedy bots or other malicious tactics.

RELATED: Customer Loyalty in Ecommerce: The Surprising Benefits of Online Fairness

The safety net: 24/7 visitor peak protection

A virtual waiting room can also be used as a safety net that only activates when a website reaches dangerous levels of traffic. Used in this way, the virtual waiting room guards your site against traffic spikes 24/7. Queue-it customers often call this feature their “insurance policy”.

In this use case, businesses and organizations will establish the traffic levels at which they experience performance issues, and will configure the waiting room to only appear when traffic climbs close to those levels.

This means most visitors will never see the virtual waiting room or need to queue for access, but the site is protected against performance issues, bots, and website crashes nonetheless.

RELATED: How to Handle Unexpectedly High Traffic

In the example below, the company set their maximum traffic levels to 1,000 new visitors per minute. Visitors in the first 8 minutes of the time span wouldn’t see a virtual waiting room since they’re entering the site below that threshold.

However, at 6:08 p.m., traffic suddenly spikes 4x to over 2,000 visitors per minute. This could be because the brand was mentioned on TV , because they sent out an email to subscribers, or because an influencer posted their product .

Chart showing traffic spiking over threshold at 6:04

Because the site has 24/7 visitor peak protection, this sudden traffic spike doesn’t result in a crash, slowdown, or other issue. The waiting room activates when this 1,000-visitor-per-minute threshold is reached, and new visitors are throttled to the waiting room.

Visitors are placed in a first-in, first-out queue , and are throttled back to the site when it’s their turn. New visitors will continue to be redirected to the waiting room until site traffic is back below the 1,000-visitor threshold, then the site returns to normal.

The exclusive or early access sale

The virtual waiting room can also be used to engage and grow loyal customer base through granting exclusive or early access. This feature is called the invite-only waiting room .

You can run a sale or registration protected by a waiting room that’s accessible only to the people you choose. First you'd segment customers and then you’d send out unique one-time-use links to the invite-only waiting room, or have customers verify their email address when they hit the waiting room page.

The invite-only waiting room enables businesses to deliver smooth and secure exclusive experiences to customers.

It empowers you to incentivize email signups and offer high-level benefits for newsletter subscribers, loyalty program members, and valued customers. Plus, it enables you to deliver exclusivity at scale by ensuring bots and non-members can’t abuse your sales and product drops .

Using an invite-only waiting room, you can:

  • Control sales access for true exclusivity.
  • Engage & grow your customer base.
  • Analyze sale success & customer behavior.

RELATED: Control Sales Access to Engage & Grow Your Customer Base

Two invite only use cases: Use invite only for exclusive or early access

Why is there a waiting room on Ticketmaster, Snipes & other major sites?

Major brands, universities, and governments use virtual waiting rooms to create a fair, reliable, and seamless online experience, no matter the demand. You'll typically see virtual waiting rooms on websites that have large, sudden traffic peaks that far exceed their usual capacity.

The Ticketmaster waiting room, for example, is used to handle the traffic that comes during massive concert ticket sales. The queue also helps Ticketmaster block ticket bots and ensure fair access for site visitors.

Snipes uses a waiting room for the same reasons, but during hyped sneaker drops.

You might also be placed in an online queue if you visit a website after a Super Bowl commercial, or if a celebrity promotes the brand.

Without waiting rooms, these sites would crash under the traffic. And website crashes cost a lot of money, spoil the customer experience, and can even threaten access to critical services and information.

You can read our blog on the cost of downtime here . But below are just a few of the staggering statistics on the prevalence and costs of downtime:

  • The average enterprise experiences 15 IT outages per year , and this number is on the rise.
  • Costs are up to 16x higher for companies that have frequent outages and brownouts compared with companies that have fewer instances of downtime.
  • 91% of enterprises report downtime costs  exceeding $300,000 per hour.
  • 77% of consumers leave a site without buying if they encounter an error.
  • 60% are unlikely to return to a site later if they encounter an error.
  • 65% trust a business less when they experience a website problem.

Cost of downtime infographic

RELATED: Cost of Downtime: IT Outages, Brownouts & Your Bottom Line

And while the public sector can face similarly exorbitant costs related to downtime and IT issues—the failures of the Healthcare.gov site launch ballooned the budget from $100 million to over a billion dollars—there can be even more significant costs than just money.

Technical issues and website crashes break down citizen satisfaction and trust, cause negative press, and perpetuate the notion that the public sector can’t keep up with the private sector in its digital transformation:

  • Only 18% of citizens believe customer experience is prioritized in government.
  • Negative defining moments effect citizen satisfaction four times more than positive defining moments.
  • Citizens who are satisfied with digital public services are nine times more likely to trust their government.

RELATED: Digital Public Services: 4 Proven Steps to Citizen-Centric Service Delivery

In short, businesses and organizations use virtual waiting rooms to prevent downtime and ensure they deliver their visitors a fair and reliable experience.

Now, the technically inclined might be wondering, “Why don’t they just scale up their servers and get more capacity? Why do they need an online waiting room?”

We cover the answer to these questions in-depth in our blogs How High Online Traffic Can Crash Your Site and Autoscaling Explained: Why Scaling your Site is so Hard .

But essentially, the problem is three-fold:

1. Websites are built to perform under their usual amount of load. Building a website that can handle huge traffic peaks that only come a few times a year is like buying a house with 10 extra bedrooms and bathrooms because your family comes to visit sometimes—it’s expensive, impractical, and unnecessary. Below is an example of when Rakuten France appeared on national news. The news appearances caused an 819% traffic spike. Rakuten used the virtual waiting room solution in this context because their site isn’t built to handle 6,000 visitors per minute—and it doesn’t need to be.

Chart showing two massive traffic spikes for Rakuten France

Related: A TV Spot Spiked Rakuten France’s Traffic 819% in 2 Minutes. Here’s How it Went.

2. Autoscaling is often touted as the solution to handling these traffic peaks. But while autoscaling helps mitigate cloud computing costs and handle changing traffic levels, it doesn’t react fast enough to prevent issues when traffic arrives in large sudden surges.

3. Even if autoscaling could handle these surges, bottlenecks typically move from the frontend to the backend. This means traffic still overloads areas that are difficult or impossible to scale, such as databases, third-party features like payment gateways, and performance-intensive features like dynamic search or a “recommended for you” panel.

"Nobody builds a website to handle hundreds of thousands of people just for a limited amount of time. Throughout the day it’s different, but having that major peak is insane. Queue-it is a great solution that saves the day and it works flawlessly." Robert Williams, Digital Manager

Read the full story

Robert Williams Snipes

1. Improving the customer & citizen experience

When customers or citizens use a website or app, they have four core needs. Aaron Walter’s  Hierarchy of User Needs sets out that systems should be functional, reliable, usable, and pleasurable—in that order.

Pyramid showing user needs: functional, reliable, useable, pleasurable

When a website crashes, slows down, or suffers errors, this whole hierarchy comes toppling down. That’s why the key benefit of a virtual waiting room is ensuring that those three most foundational needs—functionality, reliability, and usability—are firmly in place, so you can deliver a pleasurable experience to every visitor.

In terms of user experience, there’s nothing worse than a slow or crashed website. We’ve covered the sobering costs of downtime on revenue while a site is down. But slow and crashed websites are also a major point of frustration for customers. They break down trust and threaten loyalty by delivering the worst kind of customer experience possible—none at all.

1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after one bad experience, and 92% will completely abandon the brand after two or three negative interactions.

RELATED: 91 Powerful Statistics That Show Why Your Ecommerce Website Speed is Important

"The control [the waiting room] gives to manage technical risks surrounding product launches is awesome. … 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." Fairphone

Fairphone logo in green

Queue-it’s virtual waiting room also includes many features that go far beyond just preventing a bad user experience, and instead actively facilitate communication, excitement, and fairness for customers:

  • You can embed media on the waiting room page to entertain visitors while they wait.
  • You can use the communication pane to update customers on inventory and send them messages in real-time.
  • You can fully customize the waiting room page to match your brand imagery and style.
  • Customers can transfer their position in queue between devices to continue their journey while on the move.
  • Customers can set email notification reminders, so they can run errands and do work, confident they’ll be notified when it’s their turn.
  • The virtual waiting room is embedded with the tenets of queue psychology , providing detailed wait information, showing users their progress, keeping them occupied, and delivering them a fair experience.

waiting room page with Queue-it features

"The biggest benefit is driving the user experience. It’s an amazing tool for driving and connecting to people … It drives a sense of urgency, it opens a communication channel with the customer through the dynamic messaging feature and the queue page itself … This is really amazing for the business, because we can be creative and also communicate better with customers."

Alexandre Branquart, CIO/CTO

Reat the full story

Dein Deal testimonal image

Queue-it is the top-rated virtual waiting room on G2

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2. Blocking bots & delivering fairness

A lot of the businesses and organizations that choose to work with Queue-it face a mismatch between supply and demand.

This mismatch is one of the key reasons virtual waiting rooms for tickets are so common—because there simply isn't enough tickets to go around. It's also why companies and organizations face dramatic peaks in the first place: when there’s more demand than supply, people race to get first access. We see this across sneaker  and  NFT  drops,  limited-stock sales ,  vaccination registrations , and housing and  university applications .

In all these instances, the people who use bots, have faster internet, or make a living off reselling goods, typically get first access to product.

By using a virtual waiting room, businesses and organizations can prevent unfair behavior. The randomization of queue numbers in the waiting room (when using the pre-queue feature) ensures everyone gets an equal shot at access. Plus, with advanced bot mitigation software built into the product, most bots are blocked from even accessing the target site.

Queue-it and Ticketmaster's waiting room (also known as Ticketmaster Smart Queue), for instance, has blocked over 13 billion bots across 17,000+ events.

RELATED: Everything You Need to Know to Prevent Online Shopping Bots

Using Queue-it’s Traffic Insights , businesses can not only block bots and abuse, but can also get a deeper understanding of unusual traffic patterns and how to act on them. With Traffic Insights, you can identify suspicious and abnormal traffic such as:

  • IP addresses taking many spots in the queue.
  • Data Centers making up a large portion of total requests to the waiting room.
  • Good bots (such as the Googlebot) ending up in the waiting room.

This data shows businesses the actual types of visitors and requests that are behind the numbers they’re seeing in Google Analytics. It gives them a more accurate reporting of genuine site visitors, and deeper insight into the extent of their bot and abuse problem.

RELATED: Traffic Insights: Understand & Act on Your Waiting Room Traffic

RELATED: Keeping the Internet Fair: Queue-it’s Commitment to Online Fairness

Delivering a fairer experience to customers isn’t just ethical, it also has the important business benefits of building trust and loyalty. Research has found fairness explains 80% of the variance of customer trust in online retailers, and 56% of the variance in customer loyalty.

Researchers Nguyen and Tuan explain that delivering fairness creates a domino effect. Fairness strengthens trust, which builds satisfaction, which creates loyalty, which boosts sales.

They write, “E-vendors should pay more attention to enhancing fairness to create solid anchors [of fairness], because from solid anchors, trust and customer satisfaction will be established, with the domino effects spilling over to customer loyalty.”

RELATED: Customer loyalty in Ecommerce: The Surprising Benefits of Fairness

Domino effect from fairness to trust to satisfaction to loyalty to sales

"The building of queue and shuffling of customers before entrance to the ticketing system makes sure our customers experience a fair and transparent distribution of tickets, where demand and capacity do not match. We trust the Queue-it system 100%."

Read the full review

NewC Ticketing logo green

3. Capturing control & peace of mind

The cruel irony of website crashes due to high traffic is they occur when businesses and organizations are at their most visible.

When you’re launching your new product, promoting major Black Friday sales, running a marketing campaign, distributing stimulus checks, releasing tickets for a major artist, there’s massive pressure to deliver on demand and ensure a successful event.

The eyes of the public, the media, key stakeholders, and management are on you and your event. And as anyone who’s worked for a company or organization executing on high demand events knows—this makes them very stressful.

When Andrew Roberts and his team released vaccination records to the Canadian province of Newfoundland & Labrador, they “saw huge amounts of traffic all at once. We had thousands and thousands of people every second trying to come in and get their vaccine records. … The media was posting a bunch of things about the site crashing. Social media was blowing up about it. So, you know, there was a lot of pressure on us that day.”

That’s why capturing control over traffic and getting “peace of mind” is what Queue-it customers say time and time again is the biggest benefit of using a virtual waiting room.

When businesses or organizations use a virtual waiting room for a scheduled event, they have confidence no matter how successful their marketing is, no matter how many people want their new service, product, or ticket—they can handle the demand.

And when used for 24/7 protection, website managers can rest easy, certain that if the unexpected occurs, the waiting room will activate and protect the site.

"It really is a safety net. Especially over our Boxing Day sales where we weren’t at the office, Queue-it just gave us peace of mind, that if anything happens or goes wrong, it’s manageable. … The level of support was really strong. It felt like the team went out of their way to help us. Queue-it is definitely worth its weight in gold." Jodie Bratchell, Ecommerce & Digital Platforms Administrator

Lemieux logo in green

The GO Queue-it Platform also enables businesses and organizations to adjust and control traffic on the fly. This means if they accidentally let too many visitors in, face an unexpected issue, or find an unanticipated bottleneck, they can simply lower the traffic inflow or pause the queue.

In the event something on the backend does go wrong, visitors aren’t booted from the site and left to frantically refresh the page. The queue can simply be paused while the team fixes the issue and visitors can be informed of the delay using the communication pane.

"The peace of mind we get from using Queue-it is outstanding. The best thing is feeling relaxed, not having to worry, knowing that everything will be okay. The virtual waiting room reacts to and controls our traffic instantaneously, and if we need to make any changes, we can easily do it on the spot with the API or the dashboard. The benefit is real, and the ‘sérénite’ is real, too."

Thibaud Simond, Infrastructure Manager

READ THE FULL STORY

Thibaud Simond, Infrastructure Manager, Rakuten France

4. Leveraging marketing benefits: social proof & anticipation

The fourth key reason businesses and organizations use virtual waiting rooms is because of the marketing benefits of leveraging social proof and anticipation psychology through queuing.

Social proof

Imagine you’re in a new city and see two cafés next to each other, one with a queue to get in and bustling with people, and the other quiet and empty. Which do you assume is better?

If you’re like most people, you assume the busy café is better—even though you know nothing about it except that others are there.

This phenomenon is called social proof, and it’s one of the most powerful marketing tools out there.

Websites that use a virtual waiting room are essentially telling customers their site and/or product is so popular they need to limit access.

Virtual waiting room page with text "A party without a queue is not worth going to!"

Plus, when you use a virtual waiting room, all visitors can see just how many people they’re in line with. Seeing that you’re ahead of 2,000 others in queue has a powerful influence on your likelihood to convert. You know that if you don’t make a purchase, someone else will.

RELATED: 7 Simple Scarcity Marketing Strategies to Supercharge Ecommerce

Queues drive up customers’ sense of urgency and fear of missing out. Research has found that the longer people wait in line, the more they are likely to spend. Many Queue-it customers have found exactly this after using the virtual waiting room—seeing a significant increase in conversion rates.

"Because there was a queue, we saw an enormous increase in conversion rates ... People think, “Now that I’m on the site, I really need to buy something.”"

Joost van der Veer, CEO

Joost Van Der Veer portrait Winkelstraat.nl

Anticipation psychology & hype

When visitors gather on a pre-queue page, they watch excitedly as the timer ticks down for the event to start. When they’re throttled into the queue, they see their spot in line and how soon they’ll get access.

We often see site visitors post on social media while queuing online, building hype, and giving your sale extra visibility.

3 tweets from people in queues

And as people queue, their anticipation for the sale or event builds.

This building of anticipation has significant benefits for the customer experience. Dozens of psychological studies have shown the astounding power of anticipation. You can learn more about this research in our article on anticipation psychology , but for the purposes of this blog, a few key findings stand out:

  • Positive anticipation creates a greater sense of wellbeing and excitement.
  • Positive anticipation increases sensitivity to rewards.
  • Positive anticipation strengthens the memory of anticipated events.

These findings mean if brands successfully stir up anticipation, customers are likely to have a stronger sense of wellbeing and excitement for your brand, be more satisfied with the product when they get it, and remember their purchase better afterwards.

RELATED: Why Smart Marketers are Putting Their Shoppers in an Online Queue

"The virtual waiting room made people acknowledge the importance of the event and the way in which it was managed, which generated the desired hype and positive feedback." Jo Johnson, Senior Digital Marketing Manager

London Symphony Orchestra logo in green

By now you should know everything you need to know about what virtual waiting rooms are and why businesses and organizations use them. As a quick recap:

  • A virtual waiting room is a cloud-based solution used by businesses and organizations to control online traffic to their websites or mobile apps.
  • Controlling traffic to websites is important because, just like real-world stores, the experience on the website is improved by limiting the number of people on there at once.
  • Virtual waiting rooms protect against traffic-related issues like site crashes, slowdowns, and technical errors.
  • Virtual waiting rooms work by redirecting traffic from a target page to a waiting room, then throttling that traffic back to the site at a rate the site can handle.
  • Major companies and organizations use virtual waiting rooms because website crashes are incredibly costly—to revenue, reputation, and customer loyalty.
  • Virtual waiting rooms are used to improve the online experience of customers or citizens, block bots and deliver fairness, give control and peace of mind to website managers, and harness social proof and anticipation psychology.

Queue-it is the market leading virtual waiting room solution, having served over 50 billion users across 172 countries. With a mission to deliver online fairness to all, Queue-it empowers the world’s biggest businesses to perform on their busiest days. When Ticketmaster, Rakuten France, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government need to manage high demand events, they turn to Queue-it.

Deliver a smooth & fair customer experience with a virtual waiting room

gigs and tours queuing system waiting room

How to beat the Ticketmaster queue: top tips for securing tickets

Securing tickets to see your favourite artist can be a stressful experience to say the least, so we’ve put together some top tips and tricks to improve your chances of bagging those all-important concert tickets.

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  • Laura Wybrow
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Ah, Ticketmaster. We haven’t had a love/hate relationship like this since Crocs came back into fashion.

When we get the notification that we’re next in the queue, we’re practically kissing the screen and already silently thanking Ticketmaster for bringing us one step closer to seeing our favourite artist live.

However, when we’re 28,000th in the queue, and our sixth sense tells us ticket prices are hiking beyond our budget, it’s a punch in the gut.

Ticketmaster has competitive pricing, which means the more in-demand an artist is, the more expensive the tickets will be. One Harry Styles fan found this out the hard way when she spent £700 on two tickets to see Styles on his Love On Tour run.

Here at the RadioTimes.com , we're on hand to make sure that this doesn’t happen to you. Read on for top tips and tricks to beat the Ticketmaster queue, including how to sign up to presale release, what devices to queue on, and the crucial refresh rules.

More like this

Create a Ticketmaster account

For more amazing ticketing events, check out our Going Out page which includes our guide to ABBA Voyage and the best West End shows . Or check out more of the latest news like the release of a new George Michael Royal Mint Coin .

How to get presale tickets on Ticketmaster

Firstly, what is a presale? Presale tickets are available to buy before they’re released to the general public. It’s a way for artists' biggest fans to get early access.

There are a few ways you can sign up for presale tickets, for example, by joining an artist's mailing list or purchasing their most recent record. You can also get access through a network provider like O2 and Three UK, through event organisers like Live Nation, and credit card companies like American Express.

Event organisers like Live Nation will send email alerts about their upcoming presales, and the best way to find out if an artist is hosting a presale is by following them on social media.

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How can I improve my chances of getting tickets on Ticketmaster?

Lana Del Rey at BST Hyde Park

So you’ve missed out on presale tickets, and now you’re preparing for the dreaded general on sale. Here are our top tips for beating the Ticketmaster queue.

Create a Ticketmaster account in advance

If you don’t already have a Ticketmaster account, create one before general on sale tickets are released.

With an account, you can save your address and payment card details, so you don’t have to rush to type them all in when you’re trying to book. The queuing and buying process can be quite stressful, so having this information already stored will give you the chance to double-check you’re happy with your purchase and the cost.

Load Ticketmaster in one browser window only

Although it can be tempting to load Ticketmaster in multiple windows to increase your chances of securing tickets, this will actually hinder you. This is because the Ticketmaster website will only allow you to make one booking at a time, so you might end up losing tickets if you’re flicking between the widows.

Instead, we suggest joining the Ticketmaster queue on multiple devices, as we’ll explain in our next tip.

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Sign up for our Going Out newsletter to receive the latest updates on new ticket releases, plus inspiration for how to spend your weekend.

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Is it better to use the Ticketmaster app or website?

From our experience, buying tickets on the Ticketmaster mobile app is smoother and we seem to get to the front of the queue quicker. A few people online have speculated as to why this might be, suggesting Ticketmaster prioritises mobile sales because scalping bots (software programs which automate online purchasing) don’t work on mobile devices, so it increases your chances of bagging tickets on the initial click.

Also, on the mobile app, you bypass the CAPTCHA test, which generally makes the experience faster.

For great ticket deals, take a look at our how to get cheap cinema tickets and how to get cheap theatre tickets advice.

Secure internet connection

If you lose connection, even for a second, you could have to start a booking all over again. Now, we don’t know about you, but losing our spot after queuing would tempt us to throw our laptops out the window…

Make sure you have a reliable connection. Wi-Fi is always better than 4G/5G as you may lose signal.

Is your internet letting you down? It might be time to switch providers.

Get a Virgin Media Broadband package from £25 a month at Virgin Media

Get Superfast Sky Broadband for £25 a month at Sky

Not sure which broadband you need? Check out our tips on what broadband speeds are best for streaming, gaming and more .

When can you join the waiting room on Ticketmaster?

It would be fantastic if you could join the Ticketmaster queue as soon as an artist announces they’re going on tour; we’d be up at the crack of dawn, days before presale, with a tab open.

But, alas, you can’t do that.

On the day of the ticket sale, get onto the site ten minutes before the tickets are released, then refresh the page 10 seconds before the release time to improve your chances of getting to the front of the queue. For example, if tickets go on sale at 9am on a Friday morning, hop on the Ticketmaster site at 8:50am, then refresh the page 10 seconds before 9am.

Can I refresh the Ticketmaster queue page?

Absolutely under no circumstances do you refresh the Ticketmaster page while you’re in the queue!

When you're in the queue, your spot will be automatically updated, so avoid refreshing the page as tempting as it may be. If you do refresh, you may lose your place and be booted to the back of the queue.

Do these tips apply to other ticketing releases, like sports?

Although we’ve spoken exclusively about concerts here, this advice applies to all ticket releases on Ticketmaster, such as festivals and sporting events.

Head over to Ticketmaster now

For more fun things to do, we have the best steam train experiences and the best immersive experiences . To bag discounted tickets, take a look at how to get cheap cinema tickets .

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Smart Queue: The Latest Way to Shop for Tickets to Popular Events

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We’ve all been there: ready and waiting to buy the perfect tickets to see our favorite artist, show, or team. The clock strikes 10AM, you hit go, and tickets are… gone! How can that be?

The answer is ticket bots . Ticket bots are moving faster than ever – snatching up the best seats at great prices, all in a matter of seconds.

Ticketmaster is committed to fighting bots and getting more tickets into the hands of fans at prices set by the artist, show, or team. This is why we created the Ticketmaster Smart Queue , which powers the latest way to shop for tickets to popular events while keeping bots out.

The Smart Queue acts a ‘virtual line,’ which helps us protect you and tickets in a more effective way. By layering advanced security measures, monitoring traffic, and adding a virtual line, you can now view the entire venue and pick the exact seats you want to buy.

How the Smart Queue works:

  • Go to Ticketmaster and locate the event* you want to shop for.
  • Join the Waiting Room at least 10 minutes prior to the event going on sale.
  • When the sale begins, the Queue will open and you’ll be given a place in line.
  • Once it’s your turn to shop, you’ll use the map to select your seats and then proceed to checkout. Please note, tickets are available first-come, first-served, and not guaranteed.

Shopping Tip: If you’re planning to shop for an event on your mobile device, don’t allow your screen to dim or your Waiting Room will pause. Also, resist the urge to refresh. Your page will automatically refresh when you enter the Queue.

For a smoother shopping experience, we recommend:

  • Signing in to your Ticketmaster account at least 10 minutes in advance of joining the Waiting Room. This will speed up your purchase later.
  • Confirm you have a valid form of payment in your account with current email and billing information. This will make checkout a breeze.
  • If you need to step away, turn up the volume on your device so when it’s your turn, you hear the Queue notification bell.

Commonly Asked Questions

Why is there a smart queue.

It’s there to keep out the bots so every fan gets a fair chance at tickets. Previously, everyone entered the shopping experience at once. Since automated bots are faster than a real, human fan, they can scoop up tickets before fans are able to shop and checkout. This results in tickets being sold out in a matter of minutes. With Smart Queue, we manage the flow of traffic into the shopping experience while simultaneously detecting bots and reducing their access. This gives you a more fair chance, since you’re only competing against other real, human fans for the same seats.

Is anything different when I shop for tickets with the Smart Queue?

Yes. An improved shopping experience. When we use the Queue, we introduce a virtual line that manages traffic flow and eliminates the crazy rush of everyone shopping at once. This gives you more time to shop and the freedom to view the entire venue and pick the exact seats you want to buy. The one thing that having a Queue won’t change is that tickets are still available first-come, first-served and not guaranteed.

Do I have to stay on the page the entire time?

Yes. While you’re in the Queue, your spot will be automatically and frequently refreshed, so please don’t refresh, close, or leave the page. While it’s a better idea to keep your device nearby, if you need to step away we recommend turning up the volume on your device. This way, if your turn begins while you’re still away, you’ll hear the notification bell from the Queue. When it’s your turn, your spot will be held for 10 minutes to begin shopping.

Is there a set time I will get ticket access?

No, a set time is not guaranteed. Since this new process allows fans to scope out the venue and shop for the best ticket for them, there may be a longer wait than you’ve experienced before. Because we don’t want fans to feel rushed, we’ll only allow more people in when space opens up and will keep you updated on your status along the way. Remember to watch your page, as the Queue can move quicker than expected and your turn can come at any moment.

Can I skip the Queue?

No, the Queue may not be skipped. It’s set up to protect you from ticket bots, and because you can pick your exact seats from a venue map, provides a much better shopping experience for you.

Will I get tickets if I have a spot in the Queue?

Just like before, tickets are always based on availability, demand, and are not guaranteed.

* Events using the Smart Queue may vary due to traffic and demand that impact wait times.

  • Ticket Tips

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InfoQ Homepage Presentations How SeatGeek Successfully Handles High Demand Ticket On-Sales

How SeatGeek Successfully Handles High Demand Ticket On-Sales

Anderson Parra and Vitor Pellegrino discuss how their ticketing systems work and cover the virtual waiting room – the primary component that allows them to handle high-traffic ticket on-sales.

Anderson Parra is Senior Software Engineer @SeatGeek. Vitor Pellegrino is Director of Engineering @SeatGeek.

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Pellegrino: We're going to talk about how we at SeatGeek, we're able to handle high demand and ticket on-sales, and we're able to do that in a successful way, preserving the customer experience throughout the process.

Parra: I'm Anderson. I work in the app platform team at SeatGeek as a senior software engineer. I'm the tech lead for the virtual waiting room solution that was made at SeatGeek.

Pellegrino: My name is Vitor Pellegrino. I'm a Director of Engineering, and I run the Cloud Platform teams, which are the teams that support all the infrastructure, and all the tooling that other developers use at the company.

What's SeatGeek?

Let me talk a little bit about what SeatGeek is. SeatGeek works in the ticketing space. If you buy tickets, sell tickets, this is pretty much the area we operate in. We try to do that by really focusing on the better ticketing experience. It's important for us to think about the experience of the customer, whoever is selling tickets as well. This is our main differentiator. Maybe you will recognize some of these icons of these logos here, so we've been very fortunate to have partnerships with some of the leading teams in the world, not only for the typical American sports, but also if you're a soccer fan, and maybe you know the English Premier League, also clubs like Liverpool or Manchester City, they work with us. If you buy tickets for them, you use SeatGeek software.

The Ticketing Problem

Let's talk about what actually the ticketing problem is, and why we felt like this could be something interesting. When we think about ticketing, if you're like me, most of your experience is actually trying to find maybe a concert to attend, or maybe you would like to actually buy tickets to your favorite sports team, or maybe a concert, or what have you. You're actually trying to see what's available, you're going to try to buy a ticket. Then after you've bought the tickets, you're eagerly waiting for the day to come for the match or whatever event that you have, and then you're going to enter a stadium. This is what we would call the consumer aspect, or the consumer persona of our customer base. Maybe I own a venue, actually, I represent one of the big sports clubs, or I actually have a venue where we do big concerts. In that case, my interests are a little bit different. I want to sell as much inventory as quickly as possible. Not only that I want to sell tickets, but I also would like to know how my venue is. Which ones were the most successful? Which ones should I be trying to repeat? Which one sold out as quickly as possible? Also, I would like to manage even how people get inside the stadium. After I sold tickets, how do I actually allow people to get inside a venue safely at a specific time, without any problems?

Also, a different thing that we handle at SeatGeek is the software that we build, they run in different interfaces as well, which means that we have the folks that are buying tickets on mobile. We have the scanners that allow people to get inside a venue. Also, when they get inside a venue itself, they might have to interact with systems with different types of interfaces, different reliability and resilience characteristics. This is just one example of one of these physical things that run inside a stadium, like at the height of the pandemic, we were able to design solutions for folks to buy merchandise without leaving their seats. That's just an example of software that needs to adapt to these different conditions. It's not only a webpage where people go, there are a lot of things to it.

About the characteristics of ticketing itself, so in a stadium, there is a limited amount of space. It may be very large stadiums, but they all are at capacity at some point, which means that it's very often especially for the big artists, or something, like the big events, usually you have far more demand than you have inventory for. Then what happens if many people are trying to get access to the same seats, how do you actually tiebreak that? There are concurrency issues, like maybe two people are trying to reserve at the same time, how do you tiebreak? Maybe you need to also think about the experience, like it is whoever saw the space first, it is whoever was able to actually go through the payment processor first. Who actually gets access to the space? This is something very characteristic of this problem.

Normal Operations vs. On-Sales

Most of the times we are in a situation where we call it the normal operations. People are just browsing the website trying to find things to attend. Maybe coming back to the example that I brought, I just want to see what's available. To me, it's very important to quickly get access to what I want, and have that seamless browsing experience. Maybe there is what we define as an on-sale. This is actually something that has a significant marketing push behind, there is usually also something happening in an outside world that impact the systems that we run. Imagine that I'm Liverpool, and I'm about to release all the season tickets at a specific time in a specific day. People are going to SeatGeek at that specific time trying to get access to a limited amount of inventory. These are very different ways that our systems need to understand. Let me actually show you how that looks like. The baseline is relatively stable. During an on-sale, you have far more traffic, many orders of magnitude, sometimes more. If you're like me, before I joined this industry, I thought like, what's the big deal? We have autoscaling now. We tweak the autoscaling, and that should just do it. It turns out, that's not enough. Most of the times autoscaling simply cannot scale fast enough. By the time you actually start to see all this extra traffic, the autoscaling takes too long to recognize that and then add more capacity. Then we just have a bad customer experience for everybody. That's not what we want to do.

Another example of things that we have to think during an on-sale. When we think about the tradeoffs, like the non-functional requirements, they might also change during an on-sale. Latency is one example. Maybe I would say that in normal operations, I want my website to feel really snappy. I want to quickly get access to whatever is happening. During an on-sale, I might actually trade latency for more redundancy. Maybe even during an on-sale, I'm going to have different code paths to guarantee that no request will fail. If I have a 500 request, it's never a good experience, but it's far more tolerable if that happens outside of a very stressful situation that I waited in line perhaps hours to get access to. This is something very important.

Even security. Security is always forefront on everything that we do, but detecting a fraud might change during an on-sale. One example. Let's say that I'm trying to buy one ticket, but maybe I'm trying to buy a ticket not just for me, but for all my friends. I actually want to buy 10 tickets, or maybe 20. I have a huge group. How much is tolerable? Is one ticket ok? Is 10 tickets ok? Is 20 tickets ok? We also see that people's behaviors change during an on-sale. If I actually open a lot of different browsers and a lot of different tabs, and I somehow believe that that's going to get me a better chance to get access to my tickets during an on-sale, is that fraudulent or not? There is no easy answer to these kinds of things. This is something that may change depending on whether you are doing an on-sale or not. The main point here being that you must design for each mode of operation very differently. The decisions that you take for one might be different from the decisions you take for the other one.

Virtual Waiting Room

Parra: We're going to talk about the virtual waiting room, that's a solution inside of SeatGeek called Room. It was made in SeatGeek. It's a queuing system. Let's see the details of that. Before we talk about virtual waiting room, let's create a context about the problem where the virtual waiting room acts. Imagine that we'd like to purchase a ticket for an event with high demand traffic, a lot of people trying to buy tickets for this event as well. Then we have the on-sale that starts at 11:00, but you arrive a little bit earlier. Then we have a mode that we're protecting the ticketing page, then you are in the waiting room, it means that you are waiting for the on-sale to start, because we're a little bit earlier. Then at 11:00, imagine that on-sale starts, and then you are settled in the queue and you are going to wait for your turn to go to the ticketing page and try to purchase the tickets. We know that queues are bad. Queues are bad in the real world and queues are bad in the virtual world as well. What we try to do, we try to drain this queue as fast as possible.

Why Do We Need A Queuing System?

Why do we need a queuing system? We talk about that scale policy is not enough. Also, there are some characteristics of our business that requires a queuing system. For example, we need to guarantee the fairness approach to purchase tickets. In the queuing or in the online ticketing, the idea that you can have the first-in, first-out, who arrived earlier has the possibility to try to purchase the tickets earlier. Also, the way that you control the operation, you cannot send all the holdings to the ticketing page, because the users operate reserving and then finishing the purchase tickets. In finishing the purchase, a lot of problems could happen there. For example, a credit card could be denied or you realize that the ticket is so expensive, then you say, ok, then you give up and then the ticket becomes available again, then becomes available for another user that they have the opportunity to try to purchase that. It means that we need to send our holdings to the ticketing page in batches. Also, we need to avoid problems during the on-sale. We're talking about the characteristics of different modes that are operating in normal and the on-sale mode. The on-sale mode is our critical time, everybody is looking to us and we're trying to keep our systems up and running during this time. We're controlling the traffic, the opportunity that you can try to avoid problems during the high demand traffic.

The Virtual Waiting Room Mission

Then, what's the mission of the virtual waiting room? The mission of the virtual waiting room is absorbs this high traffic and pipes it to our infrastructure in a constant way. The good part, this constant traffic we know we can execute for example loading tests, then you can analyze how many requests per second our system supports. Then based on this information, we can try to absorb that spike of the high traffic, and that pipes it in a constant way to our infrastructure in order to keep our systems up and running.

Considerations When Building a Queuing System

Some considerations when you're building a queuing system. Stateless, in the ideal world, if you can try to control the traffic in the edge, in the CDN and avoid requests going to the backend, that you don't need to render that request at that time is the best way. However, there is no state in the CDN. With no state means that you cannot guarantee the order. Order matters for us. Then we need to control who arrived earlier, then to drain those people from the queue earlier. Then usually when you have the stateful situation, the status controller in the backend, traditionally, then we need to manage the state of the queue in the backend. If you have the queue, then you need to talk about possibilities to drain this queue, could be for example random selection. We have a queue then you can select few users from that queue and remove and then send to the ticketing page for example.

Again, first-in, first-out is the fair approach that we can use in our business. We choose first-in, first-out. Also, we need to provide some operation, some actions that operators can do during their on-sales. They can do, for example, increase the exit rate of the queue. They can pause the queue because there is a problem in one component of our system. They need to communicate with the audience that is there, for example, if it is sold out, you can try to broadcast that information as fast as possible, because then people don't need to wait for something that they cannot find. The important thing, metrics. We need to get metrics for all the components to analyze what's going on. We need to identify the behavior of our system in terms of how long is the queue, or how much time a user was spending to purchase the ticket. Then, how was the behavior of our components during the on-sales? This is important to make decisions to improve our systems.

Stateless or Stateful?

For us, the main discretions was around stateless or stateful. With the stateless, with a simple JavaScript code we can, for example, create a rate limit where 30% of the traffic is routed to the queue page, and 70% waits in the queue. It's simple, but in the end it's only a rate limit, there is no queue guaranteed. Because the stateless work that we can have in the CDN, we try to implement a hybrid mode, where we can have part of our logic running in the CDN and part of our logic running in the backend. We took both pills, the red and the blue pill, where the state is managed in the backend. Then everything else runs in the state, runs in the CDN. However, when I mentioned that CDN is stateless, it's not completely true because the modern stacks for the CDN, they provide a simple datastore. In this case, we use Fastly. Fastly provides a edge dictionary. We are using this edge dictionary as our primary cache. Then you have a problem, because we have DynamoDB in the backend that controls the state of the queue and controls the information of what we're protecting. Our primary datastore is DynamoDB. Then we have the datastore in Fastly's edge dictionary as our primary cache. We need to sync both these datastores. Then it becomes a problem.

Virtual Waiting Room Tech Stack

Let's zoom out and see our tech stack. Each column means a main component in our solution. Then we have JavaScript running in the browser to open the WebSockets and control the state of the queue. We have part of our logic running in the CDN. We rely on Fastly, our backend in Go. We have Lambda functions, API gateway. Data storage is DynamoDB. For observability, we rely on Datadog. How is it connected? The traffic from mobile and from browsers goes through Fastly. Fastly is the main gateway. It's the main entrance for all the traffic, and everything is controlled in Fastly. Fastly talks to API gateway that talks to the Lambda functions that talks to DynamoDB. In the API gateway, we have WebSockets, we have HTTP gateway. We also have some jobs running in the Lambda, then everything provides the entire solution.

How Does It Work?

We're going to see in detail how it works. The virtual waiting room operates in two modes. The virtual waiting room, basically where the on-sale didn't start yet, and then it blocks all the traffic that goes to the protected zone, and the queuing mode where we have a queue. Then we are draining this queue, means the on-sale starts, and both modes are protected zone. What is a protected zone in the end? It's a simple path. Usually, it's a ticketing page, where everybody goes there to try to purchase the tickets. Then we have some details, for each protected zone, we have a queue format, for each protected zone in production, we have over 2000 protected zones running now. Then you have some attributes for that protected zone, like the state. It could be blockade, throttle, done, or we're creating or designing a new protected zone. We have the path, the resource that we're protecting. It could be 1 or 10, depends on how the event was created, you have many dates or not. The details of that event. The limits as well for the exit rate. The idea that you can get in to the protected zone, a user will be redirected to the protected zone if they have an access token. With the access token, requests are routed to the protected zone.

The Virtual Waiting Room Main States

Then let's see how we can get an access token to go to the protected zone. First of all, blockade. In the blockade, there is no access token. Also, there is no communication with the backend. Everything is resolved in Fastly, in the CDN. It means that the request for a specific ticketing page is fired by the browser, then Fastly identifies that that path is protected, and the protected zone is in the blockade. Then route back the user to the waiting room page, no communication with the backend, everything is stored in our primary cache in the edge dictionary. Then Fastly validates the state of that protected zone to route the user appropriately. Then, on-sale starts and then we transition the protected zone from blockade to throttle, and a queue is formed. When the queue is formed, it's formed because the on-sale starts, then the browser fires the same request to go to the ticketing page. Then we identify that this particular path is protected by that protected zone. That protected zone now is not in blockade anymore, it's in the throttle. Then we create a visitor token, and then we route back the user to the queue page with that visitor token. When you are in the queue page with that visitor token, we have a JavaScript that opens a WebSocket to the API gateway, send that visitor token through the WebSocket, and then get registered in the queue. In that moment, we associate the timestamp with the visitor token. Then that's the way that you guarantee the order in the queue. We can sort by the timestamp, then we can see the order of the queue, how we're going to drain this queue.

Then we have exchanger function that is running in a certain period, draining that queue, that's basically exchanging visitor tokens to access tokens. We are fetching all the visitor tokens that was registered that they don't have an access token yet, then you are exchanging. When we're updating the database, we're updating the DynamoDB, this data is getting streamed. Then we're streaming the change from Dynamo to a Dynamo Stream. Then we have a function that consumes that notification from Dynamo Stream, and notifies back the user saying that we're running. We have the WebSocket open and we're taking advantage of that. You are sending back the access token. It means that the user didn't ask for the access token, it's a reactive system. When we identify that ok, you are ready to go to the protected zone because your access token was created, then you notify the user. Then the visitor token is replaced. There is no visitor token anymore. Then the user has only an access token, with that access token, you can get into the protected zone. The page is refreshed, the user sends that access token. Then with that access token, without any call to the backend, the access token is validated. The security is important. We try to identify that real users are trying to purchase the tickets, and then the user can go to the protected zone.

Behind the Scenes - Leaky Bucket Implementation

Let's see behind the scenes, let's see how those components were made. In general, we are using a leaky bucket implementation. If we're navigating in the seatgeek.com, we're not seeing queue all the time, but we're protecting mostly events in the SeatGeek. The protection is based on the leaky bucket implementation, where we have a bucket for each path, for each protected zone, it's a bucket with different exit rates. Then you can see that when request comes, if that bucket that's protecting that zone is full or not? If it's full, the request is routed to the queue page. If it's empty, in real time, we're generating the access token. If that access token is from the same mechanism that I showed before, that with the access token you can get into the protected zone. Then real time, we're creating an access token, then we're associating to the request, and the user can be routed to the target. That's an example of how it works.

Then we have a simple Lambda function that was written in Go. The way that we're communicating and caching information to Fastly, that's the important thing. We can control the cache. For example, if you identified the bucket is full for run requests, it means that for the subsequent request, the bucket is still full. It works like a circuit breaker. When we identify the bucket is full, we are returning 429 to Fastly, as HTTP code, the 429 too many requests, and we're controlling for how long it will be cached. Then in Fastly for the subsequent requests to the same protected zone, they say, they need to call again the backend to validate if the bucket is full or not, because the previous request told me that it's full. Then we're caching for a certain period, when it's going to expire, we try again. If it's still full, it's going to return 429, and then we're caching again. Then we're reducing the amount of traffic that goes to the backend, when you don't need to route requests to the backend, then you don't need to route, you can figure out that path in the CDN. That's the way that it works. Then in Fastly, it's a simple VCL code. Then with the simple VCL code, we just identify the status of the request, and we're caching it according to the status. We're not here to advocate in favor of VCL. Fastly supports different languages. In a modern stack, we can use, for example, Rust. You can use for example, JavaScript, then you don't need to use the VCL anymore.

Why Are We Using AWS Lambda?

Then, why are we using Lambda? Why do we have that infrastructure in Lambda? In general, in SeatGeek, for the product, we are not using Lambda we have another infrastructure running in Nomad that also runs on AWS. We have a completely different stack that runs the virtual waiting room in Lambda. Why Lambda? Because we're trying to avoid cascade effects. For example, if we're running our virtual waiting room together with the products that we're trying to protect, and this environment gets on fire, then we have a cascade effect for the solution that is protecting that environment. Then it doesn't make sense. Then you are trying to run aside of our product environment. AWS Lambda provides a simple way that you can launch from scratch that environment, and also supports a nice way to scale that environment based on the traffic, and is on demand as well.

Why Are We Using DynamoDB?

Why DynamoDB? Why are we relying on DynamoDB? First of all, the Dynamo Streams, it's easy to stream data from Dynamo. With simple clicks in the console, you can stream the change that was made in the simple row for a stream that you can consume later. Comparing with MySQL, for example, to do that with MySQL, then we could use a Kafka connector that's going to read the logs of MySQL and then get the logs and fires to a topic in Kafka. Then you can have problems with the team that supports MySQL. It's a big coordination. It's possible, but in the end, we choose Dynamo because it's simple to stream the data. Also, because Dynamo provides a nice garbage collector. I think everybody is familiar with the garbage collector in Java, the idea that you can collect the data that you don't need anymore. In our case, the data of the queue is important during the on-sale. After the on-sale, you don't need that data anymore. In the normal operation, the size of our database is zero because there is no queue formed.

DynamoDB Partition - Sharding

There are some tricks regarding DynamoDB. It's not so easy to scale. There are some limitations regarding the partition. Designing your partition matters. For example, the default limitations is 3,000 read requests that you can do, or 1,000 write requests in a specific partition. Over that, Dynamo starts to throttle. When we throttle we need to try to think in some mechanisms that you can have supported throttles, because if not, the user is going to receive a fail. You could, for example, retry. If you retry, you can increase the problem again. We are basically using sharding. The sharding is a way that you can scale the limits that Dynamo supports. Then, for example, with that simple code in Go, we are creating 10 different shards. Where we design our partition, our hash key, that is our partition key, and then we are appending the sharding to the partition key. Then we can increase the amount of traffic that Dynamo supports. For example, if we're using 10 shards, you can multiply the supports by 10, instead of just for 3,000 requests per second, you're going to support 30,000 requests per second, from 1,000 writes requests per second to 10,000 requests per second. It's not for free. If you need, for example, to run a query, it means that you need to deal with 10 different partitions, 10 different shards. Then the full table scan means 10 shards that you need to go through and try to fetch the data. You can run that in parallel, then you can try to have different combinations and avoid throttles in DynamoDB.

Sync Challenge: DynamoDB - Fastly Dictionary

Then, finally, let's talk about the sync challenge. We have the edge dictionary in Fastly, and we have DynamoDB as our primary datastore. We have the advantage of the Dynamo Stream. That problem to write to a table in the database and talk to another system, it's a common problem, then it was addressed by the transactional outbox pattern. For example, if you'd like to write to users table in MySQL, and then fires a message to the random queue, there is no transaction bound on that operation. Then you need to find a way how you can try to guarantee the consistency between those operations. One way is the transactional outbox pattern, basically, we don't call the two datastores at the same time. When the request to change the protected zone, for example, arrives, it talks to DynamoDB, then get updated in a single operation. Then this change is streamed, and we have a Lambda function that consumes that change in the Dynamo table, and then talks to the Fastly edge dictionary. Then if the communication with the Fastly dictionary fails, we can retry. You can retry until it succeeds. Then this way, we are introducing a little bit the delay to propagate the message, but we guarantee the consistency, because there is no distributed transaction anymore, there is no two components, two legs in our operation. It's just a single operation, then we're trying to apply that in sequence.

Let's see an example of the edge dictionary. The edge dictionary is created as a simple key-value store in Fastly, then there's a simple table that is in memory. Fastly offers an API that you can interact with that dictionary, that you can add items and remove items. This is an example of the code in VCL. With the same code in Rust, you can achieve the same, then you can take advantage of the edge dictionary, and also you can take advantage of the modern stack that you can run in the CDN using that kind of code. If you'd like to know more details about it, we've made a blog post together with AWS regarding how it works and how we are using AWS to help us to run our virtual waiting room solution. We have the link here.

Virtual Waiting Room Observability

I'd like to talk about the observability that's the important part of our system, how we're driving our decisions based on metrics, based on the information that we are collecting. We have different kinds of behaviors. We are relying on Datadog to store our metrics, but also we are using AWS Timestream database that provides us long term storage. Ideally, we can monitor and observe everything in terms of if you can see problems in the latency of Lambda functions, how Fastly is performing, how many protected zones do we have in our system? If there are errors, what's the length of the queues? How long are users getting notified? All the dashboards provide the operators and the engineers a vision of what's going on during the on-sale. We are also trying to take advantage of that to provide sensors. Sometimes we have traffic that's not expected, then you can notify the users for example through their Slack, then they are going to be aware that it was unpredictable in terms of the traffic that's going on.

Next Steps for Our Pipeline

Pellegrino: Ander talked about the current state, so the solution that powers 100% of all of our on-sales and all of our operations for a little bit over the past year. Let me talk to you a little bit about things that we're looking to do in the future. We don't claim that we have all the solutions yet. I would like to offer you a little bit of insight about how we're actually thinking about some of these problems. The first thing is automation. Automation is a key important thing for us. Because as we grow, and as we have more on-sales coming, we start to see bottlenecks. Not a bottleneck, but having humans part of that process is not scalable for us. Our vision is to have on-sales being all done only by robots, meaning that a promoter can design their on-sales timeline. They can say, I'm going to have a marketing push happening at this time, and this is where the tickets can be bought, and all the rest is able to be done. Ander was talking about the exit rate, so we could adapt to the exit rate based on observing the traffic. We could also have different ways of alerting people based on, if that's happening within the specific critical moment of an on-sale, that could have a different severity. Also, fraud detection is always an important thing for us. We want to get even more sophisticated about how we can detect when something is a legitimate behavior versus when something is actually an attempt of abuse.

Next Steps for Our Operations

I think that's a very key point here, like our systems, they must understand in which mode they are operating under. That means each one of the services that we have, each one of the microservices, they should be able to know, am I running in an on-sale mode? That can inform our incident response process. Let's say I have an issue that's happening, people cannot get access to a specific event. If that's happening outside of normal hours, it has a different incident priority, then if that actually happens during an on-sale, so the telemetry should also know that. I would actually like to be able to have each one of our dashboards reporting, what is my p99 for a specific endpoint, but actually, what's my p99 only during normal operations, or only during on-sales.

Another thing that is critical for us and we're making some important movements in that direction is around a service configuration. We do use several vendors for some of the critical paths. We would like to be able to use and dynamically change, so like say maybe I have not only one payment processor, but in order to guarantee that my payments are coming through, I can use several during an on-sale. Maybe outside of an on-sale that is not as important. SLOs, for us, whenever we define our SLOs, we need to understand our error budget, but we need to also be able to classify, what's my error budget during an on-sale? We already do quite a bit of that. We would like to do that even further.

Summary and Key Takeaways

We talked about how it's important to think about elasticity in all layers of infrastructure. Queuing are useful. People don't like being in a queue, but they're vital components. That doesn't reduce the importance of actually designing elasticity in all the different layers. If you have a queuing system, maybe you should also think about how you're going to scale your web layer, your backend layer, even the database layer as well. This was critical for us, like really understand the toolkit that you have at your disposal. The whole solution works for us so well, because we're able to really tap into the best of the tooling that we had at our disposal. We worked with AWS closely on that one. I think we could also have done this solution differently using other different toolkits, but it would look very different. I would highly encourage you to really understand the intrinsic keys, and all the specific things about the system that you're leveraging.

This is something that we started using, and it was a pleasant surprise. That's a topic that we're seeing more. I highly encourage, maybe you have a certain type of use case that fits into datastore, into moving some of that storage over to the edge. It's a relatively recent topic. It works for us. I would encourage you to give it a try. Maybe that suits you. Maybe you have a high traffic website that you could leverage, like pushing some of that data closer to the edge and where the users are accessing from in order to speed up some processes. I'll just encourage you to take a look at that.

Questions and Answers

Ignatowicz: One of the main topics is about my business logic or my infrastructure logic moving to the edge. How do I test that? How do I test my whole service when part of my code is running in a CDN provider such as Fastly? How do I do some integration test that makes sure that all my distributed system that is becoming even more distributed, we're talking now a lot of microservices run in the same code, but pushing code for other companies and other providers, especially cloud code? How do I test that?

Parra: For example, in Fastly, using VCL itself is not possible to run unit tests. That's the big advantage of using VCL in Fastly. However, Fastly was the first language used by the Fastly CDN to provide coding running at the edge. Nowadays, there are modern stacks, like you can run Rust, you can run JavaScript. Golang is in beta. Then with all those languages, you can run simple unit tests. Because it is the same idea that you're developing the backend, you are always trying to create small functions with single responsibility, and then you can test. For example, in our case, with the VCL, it's not possible to run the unit test. What do you do? We run integration tests three times per week. We created a tool to run integration tests because it's quite expensive to try to emulate the traffic. Ideally, we would like to emulate a user. Like we have an on-sale, then you'd like to put, for example, 100,000 real, open browsers, we're not talking about virtual users, like you do using Gatling, or using the k6 that are frameworks to loading test. Then we'll actually open 100,000 browsers and put in the queue. Then you can see all the mechanism, like each browser receives the visitor token, wait a little bit in the queue, then exchange the visitor token to access token, then go to the ticketing page.

When you try to use third party solutions like vendors to provide that kind of thing, for example, we have a contract with BlazeMeter. BlazeMeter offers that, but it's quite expensive. We decided to build our own solution, we are using AWS Batch with play. That's a simple one. We are treating load tests like a simple long batch job that we need to produce. Then every Monday, we launch 1,000 browsers that runs against our staging environment. Then when we wake up, we receive the report to see how it's going on, if it ran successfully or not. Then the rest of the week we have small executions only for the sanity check. The drawback is that we are running VCL, the old stack. Then we don't have the new test that is possible to run for every pull request. You do that during the week, three times per week.

Ignatowicz: Do you dynamically determine when queues are necessary, or those have to be set up ahead of time? For example, what happens if someone blows up, and suddenly everyone wants tickets for a concert that was released last week?

Parra: It was the proposal of the waiting room solution internally the SeatGeek. We are a ticketing company, and then sell tickets as part of our core business. Then we need to deal with this high traffic. When you have the on-sale, for example, on-sale next week. This on-sale was planned one month ago. The target of the virtual waiting room was to protect all the events in the SeatGeek. All the events in the seatgeek.com are protected by the virtual waiting room by the Room. Then Vitor mentioned about automation. In the beginning of the solution, we are creating the protected zones manually. It doesn't scale. We have thousands of events happening on seatgeek.com, in the platform. Then now we have an extension of this solution that basically gets all the events that are published through seatgeek.com, and then create protected zones for exit rates. What's the next step of this automation? We have the planning of all the on-sales, when the on-sale starts, when is the first sale? Then with all the timeline information of each event, we can decide when the transition is going to be applied. For example, if the on-sale starts at 11:00, we're going to automatically blockade the path at 10:30. Then at 11:00 transition to throttle, without any manual interaction. Everything is automatic.

Ignatowicz: You do this blocking for all the events?

Parra: All the events.

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Dec 29, 2022

Anderson Parra

Vitor Pellegrino

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Should You Refresh Ticketmaster Queue?

If you’re a fan of live events or concerts, chances are you have encountered the Ticketmaster queue.

This virtual waiting room is designed to help manage the high demand for popular tickets and ensure that everyone has a fair chance to get a seat.

But if you have ever wait in the queue, you know that it can be a frustrating experience.

You’re would be stuck and staring at your screen, hoping and praying that you will be one of the lucky few who get through before tickets sell out.

So, it has been happened with you that you are thinking that is it worth to refresh the Ticketmaster queue in the hopes of getting better tickets?

In this blog post, we’ll explore the pros and cons of refreshing the queue and help you decide whether or not it is worth.

Generally, it is not a good idea to refresh the page while you are in a queue on Ticketmaster, as it can cause you to lose your place in the queue. Instead, you should wait patiently for your turn to purchase tickets.

Actually, refreshing the Ticketmaster queue page will place you at the back of the queue.

Please wait patiently and check your webpage in browser in regular interval to see if the queue circle is moving or not.

If you don’t see any movement, there are chances that your browser is stuck. In that case only, try to refresh your browser by pressing F5.

Below are some steps you can take to optimize your experience while waiting in a queue on Ticketmaster:

  • Make sure that you are using a compatible web browser (such as Google Chrome, Firefox, or Safari) and that it is up to date with latest available version..
  • Close all unused browser tabs for now those may be running in the background, as they could be causing your browser to run slowly.
  • Clear your browser cache and cookies, as they may be causing issues with the ticket purchasing process.
  • Avoid refreshing the page while you are in the queue, as doing so may cause you to lose your place in the queue.
  • If you are trying to access the waiting room or purchase tickets from multiple accounts, use a different device or internet connection for each account to avoid triggering any bot detection systems that Ticketmaster may have in place.

Ticketmaster Smart Queue is a system used by Ticketmaster to manage ticket sales for popular events.

When demand for tickets is high, you may be required to wait in a queue before you can purchase tickets.

There are three main types of waiting rooms used in the Ticketmaster Smart Queue system:

  • Waiting Room with a Login and Two-Factor Authentication: This type of waiting room requires you to go through the full security process at time of ticket booking, that includes logging in into your account and verifying your account with your mobile number, in order to prevent bots from purchasing tickets. It is not possible to have two sessions open at the same time for the same event using the same account from different devices.
  • Waiting Room with a Login but no Two-Factor Authentication: This type of waiting room also requires you to log in, but does not require two-factor authentication. However, having two sessions on the same network may result in errors or issues during the checkout process of ticket booking system.
  • Waiting Room with no Login and no Two-Factor Authentication: This type of waiting room is rare, but may be used when Ticketmaster is experiencing issues with their waiting rooms. With this setup, you can try to join the waiting room multiple times without logging in into any account. However, multiple sessions from the same network may still trigger “bot type activity” and would place you at the back of the queue.

It is always advised for you to use different devices or internet connections when trying to access the waiting room or purchasing tickets from multiple accounts, to avoid getting triggered by bot detection systems that Ticketmaster uses on its website.

We have also written more articles on Ticketmaster to Fix the some common Ticketmaster issues, How Ticketmaster Waiting Room/Queue work and help you out to book tickets in optimised way.

Some Ticketmaster Articles, you might be interested to read:

  • How to Exchange Tickets on Ticketmaster
  • How to Get Tickets on Ticketmaster Fast, Strategies to Use
  • How to Transfer Tickets on Ticketmaster, Step by Step Process
  • Why TicketMaster Changed (or downgraded) Your Seats!
  • Why Can’t I Resell My Tickets on Ticketmaster
  • How to Beat Ticketmaster Queues? Strategies to Use
  • Ticketmaster Waiting Room vs Queue
  • What Does the Ticketmaster Waiting Room Look Like
  • How to Sell Ticketmaster Tickets not Eligible for Resale
  • Why is Ticketmaster Unable to Refresh your Tickets?
  • How to Change Seats on Ticketmaster

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COMMENTS

  1. Virtual waiting rooms and online queuing for queue ticketing

    The solution: virtual queuing systems that manage traffic overflow and queue ticketing user experience. Filtering heavy traffic loads by moving excess users into a virtual waiting room, they become part of an online queue, and with the pressure on the servers removed, they continue to work as normal at optimum speed.

  2. Virtual Waiting Rooms: Everything You Need to Know

    A virtual waiting room is a cloud-based solution used by businesses and organizations to control online traffic to their websites or mobile apps. It prevents website crashes and ensures fairness in high demand situations like ticket onsales, sneaker drops, and government registrations.

  3. What is the Ticketmaster Smart Queue?

    Using the Smart Queue. When you're event's sale begins, follow these steps to join the queue: Go to Ticketmaster and locate the event you want to shop for. Join the Waiting Room at least 10 minutes prior to the event going on sale. When the sale begins, the queue will open and you'll be given a place in line.

  4. How to beat the Ticketmaster queue: top tips for securing tickets

    But, alas, you can't do that. On the day of the ticket sale, get onto the site ten minutes before the tickets are released, then refresh the page 10 seconds before the release time to improve ...

  5. How does the waiting queue work

    To manage all that traffic in the right direction, a temporary queue is being set up. You will now see a circle that is filling, but this is not yet the queue to buy tickets. When the sale starts, the queue is refreshed and starts again. Now you are in the final queue to buy tickets. In other words: it does not make sense to wait for our site ...

  6. Ticketmaster Waiting Room Vs Queue

    Step 1: Open the Ticketmaster website and then go to the event that you want to buy tickets for. Step 2: Now join the waiting room for that event at least 10 mins before the tickets are scheduled to be sold in Ticketmaster. Step 3: When Ticketmaster begins the sale of the tickets the queue will open and you wi;ll be assigned a number from it.

  7. Smart Queue: The Latest Way to Shop for Tickets to Popular Events

    How the Smart Queue works: Go to Ticketmaster and locate the event* you want to shop for. Join the Waiting Room at least 10 minutes prior to the event going on sale. When the sale begins, the Queue will open and you'll be given a place in line. Once it's your turn to shop, you'll use the map to select your seats and then proceed to checkout.

  8. Ticket Bots: Everything You Need to Know

    Get the answers to these questions & learn everything you need to know about ticket scalping bots in this comprehensive blog post. 1,000+ concert tickets bought by one bot in one minute. 15,000+ tickets bought by two bots in a day. Up to 7,000% markups for tickets on secondary markets. These are just a few of the damning ticket bot data points ...

  9. How SeatGeek Successfully Handles High Demand Ticket On-Sales

    We choose first-in, first-out. Also, we need to provide some operation, some actions that operators can do during their on-sales. They can do, for example, increase the exit rate of the queue ...

  10. What's a "Waiting Room"?

    The waiting room is a holding area - getting there 30 minutes before is no different to joining 1 minute before. Online only. We only have this waiting room online, not on the phone lines. Don't refresh your screen. Once you're in the waiting room, t's best to wait. You'll be processed through to the onsale as quickly as possible.

  11. What We Can Learn from the Waiting Room Concept in the Coldplay Concert

    A prime example is the concert ticket sales of the world-renowned band Coldplay, where a queue of 1.5 million people was reported in line to get their hands on the concert tickets to a limited 60,000 tickets allocated for the upcoming November 15 th, 2023. "The waiting room is full. There are more than 500,000 users waiting in front of you.

  12. Tips, hints or advice for booking tickets

    Double-check your time zones to make sure you're selecting your desired event and venue. Make sure that you're using a steady internet connection. If you're using a mobile, you may want to try using wifi rather than 4G/5G just in case you lose signal. Download the Ticketmaster app so you can manage your tickets from your device.

  13. How Do Tickets Sell Out in Seconds? Debunking the Myth

    3. Use a reasonable cart timeout period. A 3-minute timeout period will stress your customers out. Plus, it will result in lots of fans being kicked out of the ticketing flow before they even have their tickets. But, a 20-minute timeout period is a lot more than customers need.

  14. The Power of Ticket Presales & How to Get Them Right

    Updated: 27 Feb 2024. Ticket presales are among the most effective, cheap, and impactful strategies ticketers can use to nurture loyalty and drive sales. Discover why exclusive presales are so important, what benefits they drive, and how you can get them right. Exclusivity is one of the most powerful cards up the sleeves of ticketers.

  15. Introducing Ticket2U Queue Management System (QMS)

    All-in-One Queue Management Solution with integrated Check-In System. Let us enhance your guests' queuing & service experience.... Ticket2U QMS is 100% web-based and is standard-browser supportive. Anybody can use anywhere, anytime. The Web-Controller system in waiting room enables the personnel to call the next queue number.

  16. Should You Refresh Ticketmaster Queue?

    There are three main types of waiting rooms used in the Ticketmaster Smart Queue system: Waiting Room with a Login and Two-Factor Authentication: This type of waiting room requires you to go through the full security process at time of ticket booking, that includes logging in into your account and verifying your account with your mobile number ...

  17. How does the ticketmaster waiting room work

    Parts Unknown. It's a simple concept. You sit in the waiting room while the TicketBastard employees skim the best seats off the top for themselves. Then you wait for the scalpers to use their inside connections to grab more good seats. Then TB fends off bot attacks for 45 minutes.

  18. Chop Suey

    What other Chop Suey - A Tribute to System Of A Down concerts are happening near the The Waiting Room - NE show? On Chop Suey - A Tribute to System Of A Down tours, there are usually numerous options for fans to check out Chop Suey - A Tribute to System Of A Down in person, whether for the Chop Suey - A Tribute to System Of A Down The Waiting Room - NE show in Omaha on Apr 12 or in nearby tour ...

  19. THE BEST Stavropol Krai Beaches (Updated 2024)

    Kavouri Beach Flame Towers Wholesale Market Peck Art in Paradise, Chiang Mai 3D Art Museum Lopud Island Lovers Bridge Prague Cave of the Winds Mountain Park Telefericos da Madeira Quabbin Reservoir Sunset Catamaran in Playa Flamingo Private 1-1 Muay Thai(Thai Boxing) BKK : Free Muay Thai Shorts + Hotel pick up Athens Full Day Private Tour ...

  20. THE 10 BEST Stavropol Krai Food & Drink Tours

    Find & book the best Stavropol Krai food & drink tours, tastings, classes and more on Tripadvisor. ... Express Na Pali Sunset Tour 4 Winery tasting & Barrel room tour in Temecula Ca. wine country East Zion 4 Hour Slot Canyon Canyoneering UTV Tour 4-Day Italian Lakes Tour from Milan Bishop ... Concerts & Shows. Food & Drink. Events. Shopping ...

  21. STRIZHAMENT MOUNTAIN: All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go ...

    All Stavropol Krai Hotels Stavropol Krai Hotel Deals By Hotel Type By Hotel Class Popular Amenities Popular Stavropol Krai Categories More Stavropol Krai Categories ...

  22. Stavropol Shpakovskoye Airport

    Stavropol Shpakovskoye Airport (STW) located in Stavropol, Stavropol Krai, Russia. Airport information including flight arrivals, flight departures, instrument approach procedures, weather, location, runways, diagrams, sectional charts, navaids, radio communication frequencies, FBO and fuel prices, hotels, car rentals, sunrise and sunset times, aerial photos, terminal maps, and destination ...

  23. Queue-it

    75%. of customers sell through product more efficiently with Queue-it. 86%. say their customers' online experience has improved after using Queue-it. 26%. is the average database scaling savings with Queue-it in place. "The peace of mind we get from using Queue-it is outstanding...The virtual waiting room reacts to and controls our traffic ...