How retailers can deliver truly exclusive access with invite-only waiting rooms

Early and exclusive access has taken over the ecommerce world.

It’s the number one most-desired benefit offered in loyalty programs after savings-based benefits like free shipping and discounts.

Nine in ten of the best U.S. apparel loyalty programs now offer early or exclusive access to sales and new products.

But only a few of them get exclusive access right.

The others?

Their sites crash, their sales get abused by bots, and their members leave empty-handed.

Discover how major companies like The North Face, Ticketmaster, and Rapha use invite-only waiting rooms to run exclusive access sales that actually reward loyal customers and drive loyalty program sign-ups.

Retailers use invite-only waiting rooms for exclusive or early access sales to ensure true exclusivity, keep their website running smoothly, and block bots and resellers.

Exclusive access sales involve the same challenges as any other major sale: website crashes, slowdowns, and errors like overselling or payment failures.

But the biggest challenge of an exclusive sale is in the name—it’s getting the exclusivity part right.

For many companies, “early” or “exclusive” access, simply involves sending members a secret code or a link to a hidden page. You may only send these codes and links to members, but they’re publicly discoverable and often get shared on social media and within bot and reseller communities (called “cook groups”). Non-members, bots, and resellers swarm these “members-only” sales, clearing out stock and leaving real members empty-handed.

This happened to a U.K. retailer whose PS5 stock sold out the day before it was released. One reseller found the non-public page using a footprinting bot and shared the link with members of their cook group.

The exclusive access link or code strategy is not true exclusive access. It’s like hosting an “exclusive” party with no guest list, no security, and no one monitoring the entrance. All it takes is one person sharing the address (or in this case the link or code) on social media, and anyone can show up.

Plus, this version of “exclusive access” gives you no insight into which shoppers are members, and which are non-members, scalpers, or bots. If you had this kind of visibility, the number of non-members in your “members-only” sale would shock you.

For example, when a household name gaming company used Queue-it’s invite-only waiting room to drop a limited-edition item, 94% of the total traffic to the drop came from bots, scalpers, and uninvited users.

That’s right. Of the 428,000 visitors that tried to get access, just 28,000 were actual members who were invited to the sale. The other 400,000 were bots and non-members blocked by the invite-only waiting room.

RELATED: Behind-the-scenes of a Product Drop: Rewarding Loyal Members & Blocking 700k Bots

Failing to keep bots, resellers, and non-members out of your “exclusive” sales not only harms your customer experience, it can also create traffic-related problems like crashes, slowdowns, and overselling. These false exclusive sales:

• Threaten loyalty & trust: failing to deliver on key promises to members damages their brand trust and loyalty.
  
  
• De-value loyalty program: exclusive access is designed to incentivize loyalty program sign-ups. But if anyone can get access, then your exclusive sales don’t actually benefit members.
  
  
• Crash your site: when “exclusive” links get shared on social media and among resellers, traffic becomes highly unpredictable. Unexpected surges in traffic can bring down your website—and customers can’t check out on a website that doesn’t work.
  
  
• Drain resources: if your stock gets cleared out by non-members, fraud teams need to work on post-sale audits and customer service teams need to deal with complaints from members. If surges in traffic bring your site down, IT teams must work frantically to restore it while customer service and marketing work on crisis management.
  
  
• Damage reputation: customers turn to social media to complain and journalists quickly write hit pieces about your botched drop. Plus, if you’re working on a collaborative drop, your failures reflect poorly on your partners, who may question whether you’re the right brand to work with.

“A lot of brands say they’re running early or exclusive access for members and they just send out a link that anyone can access. I didn’t want to just say ‘exclusive’ like so many other companies do. Customers don’t trust brands who make promises they can’t keep. We started using Queue-it’s invite-only waiting room to ensure the customers who gave us their data could access lower prices or new products before the rest of the market.”

CRM Manager at an enterprise U.S. retail company

Invite-only waiting rooms let you avoid these problems so you can run truly exclusive sales and drops with confidence. They empower you to:

• Provide secure exclusive access: the invite-only waiting room gates access with unique single-use links and/or two-factor-authentication (2FA). It ensures that only the members you invite to the sale can get access.
  
  
• Analyze sales success & customer behavior: evaluate your sale’s success without the noise of bot data and enhance your shopper behavior data with info on who joined your sale when.
  
  
• Ensure website performance: blocking non-members from accessing your site saves computing resources. But the waiting room also empowers you control the flow of traffic to your site, ensuring you never exceed the technical capacity of your systems and can sell as fast as possible without crashing or overselling.
  
  
• Improve customer experience: members don’t have to compete with bots and resellers to get their hands on your products. Plus, you replace the frustrating experience of a website crash or slowdown with transparent and controlled access, including detailed wait info on a branded page that can feature interactive elements like videos or games.

RELATED: Invite-only Waiting Room: Control Sales Access To Engage & Grow Your Customer Base

An invite-only waiting room acts like a security guard checking names on a guestlist at the entrance to your sale or drop. When activated, all online visitors who try to access a protected page get automatically redirected to a waiting room which runs a check to determine if the customer was invited to the sale or not.

If the customer was invited, they get automatically flowed back to the website in fair order and at a controlled rate. If they weren’t invited, they’re either sent to a non-member queue, or are blocked from accessing the sale and are kept off your infrastructure—allowing you to avoid handling traffic from visitors you don’t want.

You can use invite-only for:

• Early & tiered access: you can create multiple queues—both exclusive and non-exclusive—that allow you to segment customers into different categories and control when each segment gets access. For example, you can direct non-members to a separate queue which only gives access once all members have had a chance to check out.
  
  
• Incentivizing loyalty program sign-ups: you can add a loyalty program sign-up form to your general access queue, which acts as a “queue fast pass” to jump from the general to the member’s queue. For one enterprise retailer we work with, this tactic drove 50,000 membership sign-ups across two product drops.
  
  
• Analyzing sales success: you can access detailed data and generate easy-to-understand summary reports, which give insight into customer behavior, conversions, geography, and more.

You can choose to secure your sales with an invite-only waiting room in one of three ways:

• Email verification: upload your list of member emails, then require all visitors to verify they’re invited to the sale with 2FA.
  
  
• Unique links: generate up to 500,000 unique, single-use links which you can distribute to members for immediate access to your sale.
  
  
• Customer identifiers: generate or upload custom identifiers like a unique code or username, then require all members to verify their details to get access.

RELATED: Discover How The Invite-only Waiting Room Can Secure Your Sales

The carousel below shows the invite-only experience for members with the email verification method:

1. Visitors you've invited to the sale get directed to a waiting room where they’re asked to submit their email
2. They receive an email verification code to confirm they’re entering the sale
3. Then, they’re put into the invite-only queue and flowed to your site at the rate it can handle in fair, first-in, first-out order

1.  
2.  
3.  

Danish ecommerce company Bedre Nætter used the invite-only waiting room on Black Friday to ensure early access for members, drive member sign-ups, and keep their site online through huge traffic spikes.

Ahead of their big sale, the Bedre Nætter team set up two virtual queues, one for members and one for the general public. Each queue had a timer counting down to the minute the sale would go live—with the members-only queue slated to start hours earlier than the general access queue.

To encourage more member sign-ups, Bedre Nætter put an email field on the general access queue explaining that by joining the VIP program, customers would get access to Black Friday deals hours before the general public.

One in every four visitors who viewed this page joined Bedre Nætter’s loyalty program.

When the sale went live, the invite-only queue flowed members to Bedre Nætter’s site at the exact rate it could handle. The team closely monitored the traffic, and only opened access for the general public once they saw all members had their chance to make their purchases.

With the help of the Queue-it, Bedre Nætter achieved:

• 100% uptime, ensuring ROI on ad spend and effort spend creating demand
• 25% email capture rate in exchange for exclusive access (2,500 emails)
• 11 minutes to hit sales target

“All the members that came through the invite-only queue had a very high conversion rate. We hit our sales target for the night in the first 11 minutes. In just three hours, we hit the sales target for the whole week.”

MARCUS FORSBERG, HEAD OF ECOMMERCE & PERFORMANCE

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• A household name gaming company blocked over 700,000 bots and drove a 40% increase in loyalty program sign-ups across four drops with the invite-only waiting room.
  
  
• An enterprise U.S. apparel company drove 50,000 loyalty program sign-ups across two collaborative product drops by offering a “queue fast pass” on their general access queue page.
  
  
• An enterprise U.K. home appliances company experienced a 32% increase in conversion rates and £45k increase in sales revenue by using the invite-only waiting room for a summer sale.
  
  
• An enterprise U.S. ticketing company blocked 3.2 million bots and non-members during a concert ticket sale—over 95% of their total traffic—while giving 138,000 members fair exclusive access.
  
  
• U.K. cycling apparel brand Rapha gave early access to loyalty program members during a collaborative drop with a hyped streetwear brand.

“Running the sale with Queue-it in place made sure we achieved our goal of delivering an enhanced experience for our loyal members. We gave them the priority access we had promised them as a cornerstone membership benefit.”

TRISTAN WATSON, ENGINEERING MANAGER

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The benefits you offer in your loyalty program are a promise to customers. They’re an exchange—you get their details, they get their perks.

Living up to the promise you make is key to building brand trust and fostering a community of committed customers.

“We know we’ve done a good job when customers start talking about it within their groups and communities. We saw that with this invite-only strategy. Customers were sharing with each other that they could product X at price Y if they signed up to our newsletter. We really saw that word-of-mouth drive a lot of engagement and sign-ups and that’s how we ultimately knew we’d not only succeeded, but also delivered on the promise we’d made.”

CRM Manager at an enterprise U.S. retail company

But ensuring true exclusive access isn’t just the right thing for your customers, it also protects your reputation and bottom line. It lets you:

• Prevent site crashes caused by unexpected surges in genuine users or bots
• Reduce your cloud computing, operational, and support costs
• Incentivize more customers to join your loyalty programs
• Get deeper insight into sales success and member behavior
• Protect your reputation among your customers, peers, and collaborators

That’s why major companies like The North Face, Rapha, and Ticketmaster invite success into their exclusive sales with Queue-it’s invite-only waiting room. Book a demo today to start delivering on your exclusive access promise to members.