Using CrowdHandler for merch drops and NFTs: how to set up your waiting room for a successful drop.
In the last blog post I wrote about why a waiting room is the best way to manage your traffic if a lot of people tend to arrive on your site at a specific time.
For sellers of limited-edition products, both physical and digital, this is especially true. Whether you're releasing digital sports collectibles, selling NFTs or planning a designer sneaker drop, your sales actually have a lot in common from a waiting room point of view: they all generate fever-pitch excitement in the run-up, with eager fans keen to reserve their spot, and they all expect a mad dash at the point when the exclusive product drops.
For these CrowdHandler customers, a waiting room makes total sense.
However, the "drop" waiting room setup needs some special consideration. Unlike generic setups, the key to a good drop is the build-up. So, rather than having a generic waiting room, always on and ready to protect your site, there are a few things you will need to do differently.
As always, our knowledge base articles will help you. But in the meantime, here are the main things you need to know.
URL trigger
CrowdHandler can be set up to trigger when someone hits any page on your website. But for a drop, you're probably going to want the waiting room to trigger upon arrival at a specific URL. That URL could be the landing page for a specific drop, or it might be a login landing page: many of our customers prefer users to have an account and be logged in to it by the time they grab their spot, so having the waiting room trigger upon a successful login works well for them. The choice is yours, but the URL trigger is something you should think carefully about.
Build-up
I mentioned that the key to a good drop is the build-up - and here's where the waiting room comes into its own. For a successful drop, CrowdHandler isn't just a protection device, it's a key function of the sale. Schedule your waiting room for around 15 to 30 minutes before the drop, and your queue to activate at the scheduled drop time. As well as gathering up anyone who's hanging around on the site hoping to be first ("goal hanging"), the waiting room will make sure that no-one is interrupted until it's time for the sale - and your users will see a countdown screen, building the anticipation and adding to the sense of excitement.
At the point of the drop, your queue will activate: users will be assigned a random queue position, and the frenzy can begin.
Get your rate right
Your website can only handle a certain number of transactions per minute, so it's important to get the ingress rate right. This is the number of users you tell the waiting room to send to the website per minute - it's not the total number of users you're expecting! We find a lot of our customers tend to overestimate the rate they can handle significantly, letting too many users through at once, meaning they overload the site at the crucial moment. So start small and work your way up. Your buyers will be fine holding on a bit longer - after all, that's what the waiting room is for - and they'd much prefer to wait a few seconds longer than to arrive on a site that crashes under the pressure.
Even better: use the autotune feature, which will judge the rate for you and adjust it automatically.
Message your users
Use the message box to message the users in the waiting room about stock levels and other key information. Users are always happier when they are being communicated with, so keep them up to date as the sale goes on. More importantly for you, warning users that you're out of stock and that they have no chance of a purchase means they won't hang around, allowing you to get your site back to normal faster once the drop is done.
Multiple drops? Schedule multiple rooms
So you've got a drop at 2pm and a drop at 4pm. It's possible that, by 4pm, some of the 2pm users are still on your site - perhaps you're worried they may deliberately hang around to try and get a head start in the 4pm sale. By scheduling multiple rooms, you can ensure this isn't a problem. Even if your two (or more) rooms use the same trigger URL, that's OK - the new room will take precedence, taking all the stragglers from the previous room and rounding them up into the new room, where they will receive a new queue position and start the process again.
Tear down
Once you’ve sold out of stock, and told everyone you're out of stock, you need to figure out what you’re going to do with the users that didn’t make it. It’s possible that letting them all onto your site at once will still crash it, so you may want to leave the waiting room in place. Typically, users who aren't trying to transact will generate less load on the site, so one way to get things back to normal is to ease your ingress rate up to the maximum, using the dashboard to keep an eye on your site's performance, until the room clears.
If you have autotune enabled, it will sense that your site can handle more of this kind of traffic and do this for you.
Integration
We offer a range of different integrations to get CrowdHandler onto your website. If what you're selling is a fairly standard product, but you know that there will be peak load issues when it goes on sale, JavaScript integration may be sufficient for your needs. However, if you’re selling NFTs, or any high-value, limited edition digital product that attracts technically savvy users, you will want to use our DNS implementation or one of our Edge-worker integrations.
Alternatively, of course, it is possible to roll your own. Because the waiting room action is a key feature of the sales process for some of our clients, in the ways I've detailed above, you may want to build CrowdHandler integration and checks into the sales process from the start. You can find out more about dedicated API integration here.
That’s it! CrowdHandler is helping sports teams, collectibles and NFT companies, just like yours - sign up for free to try us out.