To queue or not to queue

When organizing an event, one of the key questions to answer is whether you should implement a queuing system for ticket sales. With modern technology and hugely scalable cloud infrastructure, most ticket buying websites don't technically need a queuing system, however from a usability point of view, it is another matter.

For popular events, when the ticket sales time arrives, you may have many more customers attempting to buy tickets than actual tickets. While the ticketing system can probably cope with the technical demand, if all of these users try and reserve tickets at the same time, very quickly, probably within a second or two, your event will be sold out. This can lead to frustration among customers. However, not all of the users that reserved tickets will actually complete payment, or not all payments will be accepted. Eventually a lot of these tickets will be released and made available again, usually about 10 minutes later. This becomes a rather strange user experience.

Bots

Another consideration is if you expect automated bots to attempt to book tickets for your event. In many cases, these are sophisticated scripts designed to book as many tickets as quickly as possible. Although we can add re:captcha (Click here to prove you are human), and other tricks to slow them down, they will still manage to book substantial amounts of tickets and frustrate real customers. With a queuing system in place, you can also ensure bots are added to the queue and even perform certain analysis or blocking in advance of granting entry to the event sales website.

Fairest queue?

When setting up a queue, you also need to decide when the queue should open, and how customers will be allocated a position in the queue. By publicizing a queue many hours in advance, you encourage users to visit the ticket sales site too early which can also cause frustration. Once users join the queue, should they be given access to the ticket sales in a first come first served approach, or will they be randomly allocated a position once ticket sales begin? At liveticket.app we allow the event organizer to choose between 2 options:

In a random order (Recommended) Before the start of ticket sales, everyone who joins the queue will be given a random position. Anyone who joins after the start of ticket sales will be allocated a position in the order they arrive (after the people who arrived before the start of the sale)

In the order they enter the queue Once the queue starts to form, everyone will join in the order they open the ticket sales page. While in the physical world this would seem to be the fairest option, in the online world it means that organized users, and worse, scammers will try and add as many bots as possible to join the queue exactly (to the millisecond) the time at which the queue starts, and therefore be the first to buy tickets.

Conclusion

If you anticipate strong demand for tickets when they initially go on sale, you should consider activating a queuing system for a better end user experience. A properly implemented queue system will give the impression of a fair allocation of tickets for your customers.