How to plan for a rush registration
A ‘rush registration’ typically refers to a period of accelerated and potentially limited registration for an event, camp, or activity. Most commonly there is a heightened demand for a number of registration slots.
Customers anticipate registration opening, either when your business sends an email blast to let them know that classes will be open for registration during a specific time or when you announce the time and date on your website. This then creates a sudden "Black Friday'' traffic surge. This type of user behavior combined with heavier traffic to the site can cause an additional load on our servers that we need to plan for and monitor.
If you know you’re going to have a large volume of registrations at the same time or you’re “opening up registration” at a certain time and expect an influx of registrations, it’s important that you fill out this sign up form for rush registration support. You will be asked the following questions in this form:
- Provider Name
- When will you publish your next schedule?
- What time
- Timezone
- Do you want to use the cart timer?
With the cart timer enabled on your account, a customer's cart will hold any spots they add for up to 10 minutes while they complete checkout. This prevents someone else from clicking more quickly and essentially cutting them in line and taking their spot! This can also prevent overbooking. Please read our help center article about this feature, as there are some limitations.
We can then schedule your rush registration on our end and prepare the site with the necessary actions to increase capacity and bandwidth to support your rush as well as maintain our normal day-to-day registrations.
Waiting room
If a waiting room is enabled for your rush registration, essentially it means that we’ve created a waiting room or virtual queue for your customers during the registration process once the site hits a max number of active users. This prevents the site from crashing or from slowing down and allows those who clicked on their classes first to get through the registration process with fewer issues.
The waiting room will be turned on 24 hours before you open registration.
Once registration opens and the maximum number of users are in the process of registering, the waiting room will display. Customers will see an approximate wait time and will be moved off the queue in the order they were added once other users have finished registering during the allotted time.
The page will automatically refresh when it’s “their turn”.
The waiting room feature is administered by Cloudflare, which is the web performance and security company that we've always worked with behind the scenes. Typically you don't see their features, but customers will see their logo on the waiting room page.
Think of the waiting room like a registration queue when ordering tickets for high demand concerts (aka Taylor Swift tickets!). Or think about customers lining up outside of a store before it opens, compared to customers being let into an empty store and then contending for the limited items that are put on the shelves. The waiting room is in place to hopefully prevent any issues that arise during a rush.
Here is some more detailed information on how a waiting room works:
- A maximum of 200 unique users will be able to access your widget at one time.
- Users 201 and up will instead see a waiting room, which will show their estimated time remaining to enter. Once one of the original 200 users' session ends, the next person in line will be allowed to start their session and so on.
- On occasion, customers are queued up before you open registration. This means they're all logged in and ready to go waiting for you to publish, so it's essentially to control the rush once you open registration. This typically occurs during a very high demand rush registration.
- A customer's session will expire automatically after 3 minutes of inactivity (either after they exit the site or if they stay on the site but don't click on anything or refresh for 3 minutes). This enables customers to get through the process and fill out the necessary form fields.
- Anyone whose session expires will be put back into the waiting room.
- The regular cart timer will behave per normal.
We know rush registrations can be stressful, for both your business and your customers. That's why we're here to help every step of the way. Please feel free to reach out to support@hisawyer.com once you schedule your rush and we'll walk you through the steps to make sure we're both prepared for a successful rush registration process.