Yes, if you expect your event to be in high demand, there is an option to have a waiting room scheduled in advance of your on-sale date.
What is a "high traffic" event?
A high traffic event is an event that you expect will bring an influx of customers to your site repeatedly refreshing the page waiting for the exact moment that the event activates and goes on sale. High traffic events can cause slow-downs or delays in the speed and loading time of the event web page. If you expect that your event will have far more people trying to get tickets than the actual ticket capacity available, that can cause a flurry of traffic where customers get frustrated if they arrived early and weren't one of the lucky few of get the coveted tickets to your highly anticipated event.
High traffic events come in all shapes and sizes...here are just a few of the kinds of high traffic events we've seen with very passionate ticket buyers:
a well-known musical artist (think Taylor Swift or Reba McEntire)
a music festival with limited spaces for on-site camping using a campsite selection chart
a retirement community that has limited events at the community clubhouse and limited seating
a multi-day large-scale desert event focused on "community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance"
How does ThunderTix help manage high traffic events?
When you set up an event in ThunderTix and you schedule the on-sale date (activation date) to be some time in the future AND your event has a large capacity (greater than 500 total tickets), you will see an alert like the one shown below.
This Alert is shown to event administrators upon completion of creation an event with an on-sale date scheduled in the future.
If you feel like your event qualifies as a "high traffic" event based on the above description, make sure that you choose "Yes" to the High traffic event alert. When you do so, we will automatically schedule a waiting room to allow excited guests into an organized queue. The waiting room will help scale high traffic and allow customers into the purchase process at a steady rate based on their arrival time to your event website.
What do customers experience?
Customers that enter the waiting room will see a message that they've entered a waiting room and that they should NOT refresh their screen. To help manage expectations, the waiting room will show an estimated wait time before being allowed into your event. The waiting room works well to help ThunderTix maintain fast speeds, page loading, and 100% up-time. In turn, this reduces frustration from ticket buyers through clear messaging.
In addition to enabling the high traffic alert for your event, it never hurts to notify the ThunderTix success team about your upcoming event along with the date and time you're going on sale. If you know there are only 600 tickets but you expect 5000 people trying to get those 600 tickets, please notify us in advance to allow us to monitor ticket sales with you.
What if you said "No" to the high traffic event alert?
Don't worry! If you said No at the time you created your event or if you didn't see the alert, just submit a support request and let us know which event(s) will be expected to bring a high volume of ticket buyers. We can enable the high traffic event alert on our end to ensure the waiting room is triggered to manage volume.
