The Waiting Room function applies globally to all VoucherCart client accounts.
Its purpose is to safeguard the user/buyer experience and minimize potential disruption caused by spikes in traffic on accounts whilst users are in cart/checkout flow.
How does it work?
Your VoucherCart account is designed to handle high volumes of visitor traffic to your sales pages, as well as all unique voucher, gift card, ticket or membership product pages across your account.
However, when account-specific high traffic and load conditions are met (typically caused by spikes/surges in visitor traffic the waiting room function will trigger automatically for users arriving at your voucher products or main sales page URL.
Users will see the following message:
What experience can a user who encounters a waiting room expect?
Depending on the specific load conditions present at the time of attempting to access the desired voucher product or sales page URL, the user will see the message above with a waiting time typically in the range of a few seconds up to around 5 minutes.
Each user receives a cookie to manage the dynamic outflow of requests from the waiting room to the target URL in First In First Out (FIFO) order.
While in the waiting room, the user's browser automatically refreshes every 20 seconds to give them updated information about their estimated wait time.
When a user exits the waiting room and reaches the target voucher sales page or voucher product URL, they can leave and re-enter without waiting for the length of time specified by the session duration.
Because waiting rooms support dynamic inflow and outflow, new spots appear more quickly and estimated wait times are lower and more accurate.
How can we avoid waiting room auto-deployment on our account?
Don't worry, the threshold for triggering a waiting room on your account is quite high, however, this varies from one account to the next depending on a range of variables and is not exclusively associated with the unique number of visitors at the same time. It may be influenced by factors such as page assets, where the inbound page accesses originate, and any parameters passed in the page requests such as UTM or GET request parameters etc.
If you'd like to avoid this experience for your customers, the following table provides an indicative guide based on number of concurrent users/page visitors on your account:
Users per minute | Waiting Room Display | Approx Waiting Times |
1 - 1000 | Unlikely | - |
1000 - 7,500 | Possible | 0-3 minutes |
7,500+ | Likely | 3-5 minutes |
If you believe you expect to drive high-volume traffic to your main sales page or specific voucher product URLs during peak sales periods, and you are at risk of triggering a waiting room based on the table above, consider breaking marketing activities such as ad campaigns or bulk/volume email promotions into phases over a few hours or days.
This will help spread customer traffic to your account and lessen the likelihood of waiting times for your valued customers.