Introducing: Skiddle’s new fair, user-friendly Queue

Skiddle have recently released a new feature to help true music get tickets for popular events – introducing our new queue system.

We have all been there, waiting for tickets to go on sale for someone we’ve been dying to see, logging onto the event page early and keep refreshing. As the clock counts down to on sale time we press f5 only to see either a) a blank screen as the website doesn’t load or b) the tickets all sold out!. 

Skiddle are making queueing fairer

Our new queue system gives all our customers a fairer chance at buying tickets no matter where you are, what your internet connection is like or if you arrived an hour before or 1 minute before on sale time.

For any high traffic event, our queue system will be switched on so anyone trying to access the event page will be redirected to a dedicated waiting room. Once the onsale time arrives everyone in the waiting room will be assigned a random place in the queue, this means it doesn’t matter what time you arrived in the waiting room (as long as it’s before the onsale time), you have an equal chance at being in the front of the queue.

Once you have been assigned a position in the queue, we’ll take you to a page that shows you your position, approximately how long you will be waiting until you are at the front of the queue and what percentage of tickets are left.

When you hit the front of the queue, you will be able to go through to the event page and make your purchase. If you accidentally close your browser, fear not, when you re-open your browser, we will remember that you were at the front so you won’t go to the back of the queue.

Customers love the Skiddle Queue

At Skiddle we believe the customer experience is the most important factor when designing any new features. In fact, we’ve won multiple awards in recognition of this. 

We spent weeks careful crafting the best experience we could imagine – a far cry from the solutions currently being used. 
We tested with real people to gauge their feedback, then kept going until everyone loved it.

Here’s some feedback from real users after a recent event:

Technology behind the queue

Our system is built entirely on AWS. The waiting room and queue are built in REACT that are stored on AWS S3, behind a CloudFront distribution so it is highly scalable. To store everyone’s positions we use either MySQL Aurora or Dynamo DB. The API that updates your positions and wait-time is on its own EC2 instances behind Application Load Balancers which again can be scaled up with demand.

AWS CloudWatch is used to monitor the queue, ensuring everyone is getting a good experience.