Online Ballots vs Virtual Queues: Why not both?
Queuing is dead. Long live queuing.
Not quite, but whilst we were at the Ticketing Professionals Conference (TPC) this year, a big debate was underway. Virtual Queues vs. Online Ballots, two very different ways of managing overwhelming demand.
Whether it’s ticketing on-sales or sneaker drops, if you know you’re going to face far more demand than you have availability, the customers that miss out are going to be disappointed.
The argument goes that queues can feel like you’re inviting chaos and sending your most loyal customers into battle against each other, whereas ballots are orderly, measured and fair for all sides. The counter argument is that queues make demand visible and generate hype around your sale. If customers can’t see how many other fans they are competing with how long before that hype fizzles out?
That’s without mentioning that there is a lot of trust involved in presuming that ballots are fair. With all the chat about backdooring sneakers, and tickets appearing on reseller sites before the drop’s officially begun the ballot has the potential to be murkier than the queue reducing trust.
At CrowdHandler, loyal clients like Royal Albert Hall, Glyndebourne and Newport Polo incorporate ballots and ballot-like processes into their on-sales that still involve utilizing queues. Whether that’s inviting season-ticket holders to a private waiting room to renew, before opening up access to the public or allowing their customers to put together a proms plan in preference order before they queue to see if their selections come off or the famous Glyndebourne ballot that precedes the public on-sale.
With CrowdHandler you can provide an experience that delivers the best of both worlds, something in between a queue and a ballot. And you can do that with some simple adjustments to your waiting room setup and template design and plugging into your existing ecommerce platform without making changes. Here’s how it works: Let’s say we’re selling 500 ultra-rare bottles of whisky.
We’ll start by setting a 24-hour countdown, and selecting the option to let customers add their email address while the countdown is happening. Once they’ve entered their email address, they’re in the ballot.
Tweak the copy in the template to tell people to pre-register.
Now, let’s set the room stock level to 500 (for the amount we have available) and configure our rate to 100. By setting One In, One Out to track stock, you can make sure you don’t allow in more users than you have availability.
Once you’ve done that, you just need to configure the email message with a personalised message, including a version for when you’ve sold out:
Once that’s all sorted, here’s how your drop will go:
Users will be able to pre-register during the 24 hours leading up to the drop time. Those that don’t pre-register and wait in the virtual queue will be put at the back of the line.
Once the countdown is finished, everyone who has entered their email address will be placed in a random order.
As the rate was set to 100, 100 emails will be sent out to the customers in the order they were allocated places.
Every few minutes, you’ll update the stock level so those receiving emails or still in the waiting room can see how many items are left. (If you’re using our Shopify integration, this will sync automatically, otherwise you may want to do a custom integration).
Once you’ve sold out, users will stop being let in, the “Sold out” message will display on the waiting room and the post-sale email will start going out to those still waiting.
In the debate between ballots, lotteries and queues, with CrowdHandler, you don’t have to pick a side. The important thing is finding out what your audience will find fairer or more engaging. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different types – you might see great success with a ballot for a big product drop but for your Black Friday sale, your audience will prefer a queue.
You might be wondering what happens to email data that is inputted into CrowdHandler. We don’t store any of that data permanently and only use it to send whichever email you’ve allocated should be sent out.
We are constantly improving CrowdHandler to manager larger amounts of traffic and give you access to even more features so make sure you keep an eye out on our LinkedIn and X (Twitter) pages for updates.
If you’re thinking of running your next drop or on-sale through a ballot, get in touch with us.
Sign up