New feature: live availability for your drops

For customers who use CrowdHandler to control access to a limited edition product – whether that's sneakers, collectibles, tickets or bottles of whisk(e)y – we have a new feature that will dramatically improve your drop: Stock Availability.

From now on, you’ll see a new field in the CrowdHandler waiting room: a checkbox to ‘Show Stock Availability’ and a number field for the amount. 

What is the Stock Availability field for?

We added this field in response to the way we saw customers using the waiting room messaging feature.

We noticed that, when there are more users than products, customers like to communicate live stock availability during the on-sale. By giving people in the waiting room an indication of stock levels, they can manage users' expectations, allowing them to draw their own conclusions about how likely their queue position is to result in a successful purchase.

It means you can offer a better user experience, and stop people from waiting around long after all the product has been snapped up.

Until now, there wasn't a standard way to communicate stock levels to users in the queue, so CrowdHandler customers used different strategies. Most used the message feature to update the users in the waiting room. Some successfully built stock checker widgets into their waiting room templates, which checked availability within their e-commerce platform. All wanted to make sure that users in the queue understood how much stock was left.

Because this was such a common use case, we decided to build a Stock Availability feature into the CrowdHandler waiting room, and it is now available on the Standard plan. 

How does it work?

‘Availability’ is a simple number field that you can update in the admin panel, or via the API. 

You may decide to update the number manually at regular intervals during the on-sale. Or, if you have a reliable, up-to-the-minute platform, you can write an integration to update the stock status via the API once per minute.

The Stock number will then be inserted into the template, and you can modify the language around it to make sure users waiting in the queue understand how it’s related to stock levels. 

For example: let’s say you set your stock number to 250. You then modify the text in the template to suit your product, and we will add the stock number automatically.

So you may decide that the text presented around the number should read:

“Approximately 250 Seats available”

“Bottles left: 250”

“Slots left: 250”

or…

You can also add a dedicated ‘Sold Out’ message to let your customers down gently when availability reaches 0.

Using a custom template? You'll need to update it

If you're using our standard template, you will see that it's already been updated to incorporate the Stock field with some basic text: ‘Availability: X items’. We recommend that you edit this text to fit your brand. 

However, if you created a custom template before we launched this feature (in other words, if you downloaded and customised our standard template before we added the Stock field), you will need to update. To do this, download the standard template from the admin panel, find the new stock field tags, and add them to your custom template.

Start using the Stock Availability feature today

Think this will be useful for your next on-sale? If you’re on a Standard, Plus, Professional or Enterprise plan, simply go to your room page and look for the Stock field. For more information, see the CrowdHandler Stock Availability user guide.

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