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We all know that November and December include some of the busiest shopping days of the year, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But is your retail site ready for the rush? With a Black Friday waiting room, you can relax for the whole holiday season, knowing that your site is set up to handle the traffic.

Every year, Black Friday seems to start earlier and earlier. This year, our clients are planning all kinds of special promotions, drops and events throughout November, and running sales across several days or weeks. Whatever your holiday season retail strategy, here are some of the ways a waiting room can help your sales to run super smoothly.

General protection

Firstly, for all-round protection, we recommend that you install a general waiting room well in advance. Spend a day getting it configured and ready – setting a rate, putting it live – before Black Friday. Then, when the busy season begins, and your site starts to get excess traffic, the waiting room will kick in and handle it.

This simple “set and forget” measure allows you to relax in the knowledge that, when your retail pages get busy, users will be queued and the site will keep transacting. When the traffic dies down, the waiting room function will stay out of your way until it’s needed again.

Special-purpose waiting rooms for daily drops

If you're running special offers over the holiday period – perhaps timed to drop in sync with advertising announcements or promotional events – then we recommend scheduling a series of “drop” waiting rooms. For each promotion, you can set the queue to activate at the point of the drop. 

A “drop” waiting room helps to build anticipation with a countdown, and ensures that no-one’s visit is interrupted until the point of sale.

• Read more: How to set up your waiting room for a successful drop 

Promotional waiting rooms

If you’re restricting traffic to the transactional side of your site during Black Friday and the holiday rush, why not use the waiting room page to show off your best offers to customers in the queue? 

With a branded waiting room page, people who are waiting to get onto the site and transact will see a range of promotional deals, so they can figure out exactly what to buy while they wait.

If you have specific ads running throughout the season, then this promotional page can be campaign driven, rather than just brand driven. With CrowdHandler, it’s easy to match the styling and content of your waiting room page to your latest marketing campaign.

Black Friday is just the beginning

It's tempting to think of Black Friday and Cyber Monday as crunch days for sales but, in our experience, they are just the beginning. Whether your customers are celebrating Nikolaustag, Christmas, Oseibo or Boxing Day, the run up to Black Friday during November starts a long season of holiday shopping. 

By setting up your waiting room strategy well in advance of Black Friday, you can be totally prepared for November and December. Once your Black Friday waiting room is in place, you can rest assured that your site will stay protected throughout the holiday season.