Still thinking to queue all day long for your desired gadget? To be honest, in this era of the internet, standing in line all day long is so yesterday. The only reason a company still opens an offline queue is to “show off” that its product is high on demand – when long queue is seen. Certainly, it’s more practical if the queue is brought online. But what if the goods is sold online while potential buyers are racing to access it at the same time? How to determine who’s the first in line and has the right to do transaction and pay for the goods?
Multiply as one of Marketplace service provider is trying to bridge this issue by offering “Virtual Queue” feature. This process has been done during Samsung Antri Online – Samsung Online Queue and SHOPFEST on May. This feature is an original product of Indonesian developer. So how does this Virtual Queue work?
I tried to find some information from Multiply. Nirmala Hapsari from Multiply tried to explain the process of Virtual Queue. According to her, every virtual queue activity will have its own page to distinguish it from general product sale. To be able to access this page, visitor needs only a Facebook account to verify data and of course, Multiply account.
Here’s what visitor has to do next:
- Open the online queue page and you will be asked to log in via Facebook.
- Choose which queue to follow.
- When you’re already in the queue, you can do some activities to add points (i.e. answering trivia questions, cleaning the ‘garbage’, even meeting an in-between who can bring you several steps closer).
- By the end of the activity period, only some people will be entitled to buy the product with cheaper price (depends on the number of product offered).
- Purchase will be done through Multiply’s system (Buy Now button included)
- After payment is done, the product will be sent to your address.
The result is tired-free, fun and interactive queue. Only by as many points (and as fast) collected, visitor can get smaller queue number. Obviously this system can’t satisfy every party. Even logging in early does not guarantee smaller queue number.
One thing for sure, I’m hoping for this virtual queue scheme can be applied more any product. Rather than queuing for hours only to find out that the gadget that we want is already sold out, this virtual queue is an effective solution for more fun queuing process.
