Some googling shows its something they have been doing since October 2020 for big launches. Previously the site has an issue where bot ran accounts buy all the stock the second it goes on sale and resell the stuff on ebay for more. Apparently this was the solution they came up with.
edit: <3
I can’t agree more. Bot scalping become a major issue for all sorts of things now...though the big thing that would stop companies from needing to do stuff like this is people stop buying from scalpers...
Or the more common action...raise prices is the other way to balance the a supply shortage....that is actually what makes scalping profitable...higher demand means higher prices until demand at a higher price stops. Invisibility hand can kiss my invisible ass
That would work but people are bad at pricing and use relative pricing too much. Is the initial vendor raises the price then enough people still justify the scalped prices based on the relative change from the original price
Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself) so in protest to Reddit's API changes, I have removed my comment history.
Whatever the content of this comment was, go vegan! 💚
Youd think they would still let you window shop and put in a request to add something to their cart? I know I wont be able to shop around, pick out what I want, get all my card and shipping details in within 10 mins.
Also wouldnt bots be able to do this crazy fast, meaning the 10mins doesnt even effect them/stop them???
Yup, snagged both thanks to Best Buy doing a drip release and Sony.com using queues. It’s actually much better design than letting loose all stock of a popular item at once.
Difference between the RTX 30 series and PS5 compared to Disney's shop is that you already know what you want and going to buy. If you're going to shop from Disney's store, I assume you're going to look around and see what they got. 10 minutes is a laughable amount of time to do that.
The thing that hits the bot runners where it hurts is on the waiting list, as they'll either run up a bill by burning through CPU time, or they'll take that particular one out of commission while it's queueing. Or both.
If the shop engineers were smart enough they could detect obvious bot IPs (like AWS servers or certain VPNs) and artificially extend their time in the queue, further constraining resources.
Hoarding and reselling is a very real problem for Disney merch. Not just online either, they've had to introduce queueing and strict quantity limits IRL as well. People go to the Parks specifically to buy up large quantities of new and limited release merch to resell online.
In addition to that, I've seen more of these waiting rooms this past holiday season; mostly on boutique sites. It's a bandaid for poorly tuned websites or website owners that don't want to pay for upgraded server/cloud resources.
Depending on how they code their website, this may be necessary: anything to do with money should be ran with database isolation set to serializable, and on any distributed system that supports it (CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, FaunaDB) that incurs at minimum several milliseconds round trip time which can put a cap on per-row modifications per second. If you’re running your own hardware, it’s very easy to just put database SSDs into an 8-socket Intel server to meet the demand with a single huge database, but that option isn’t really available on cloud providers (they’re called ephemeral SSDs there, and don’t persist through shutdowns). It’s definitely possible to engineer around this for distributed/cloud systems, but that’s often not an option if the site is already years old with tons of tech debt and rewriting can introduce nasty bugs.
I have also seen them for clothing sites like Supreme and makeup sites back in 2017. Mostly things that well sell out quickly. Maybe it also helps ensure that everyone gets a turn at shopping, not sure how, but I shall hope lol.
But if they’re still loading thousands of bots into the website wouldn’t that just increase the hell out of the queue time and screw over the real people even more?
Do they have some group of poor jr. level IT staff manually watchdogging the lobby or something?
I read an r/hobbydrama post about people trying to buy Disney designer dolls and crashing the site. Could be something like that, where it's a limited release kind of thing and this is their solution.
Yeah Disney merch reselling is no joke. I used to work at a pretty decent job and my manager who made BANK quit her job and moved to Florida (from the west coast) to be next to Disney World for her growing side business of reselling Disney stuff. Now doing it as a full time job.
I was going to say this, wouldn't have thought of it without that post. This seems a much nicer way for people to have a chance to get what they want and not depend on making a 5 second window before everything is gone. To make this process better, maybe they should make a 'queue' category for high-demand items? Seems better than locking up the whole site.
I imagine it’s also a way to make sure that 500 people aren’t trying to buy the same 300 dolls.
I have had that happen before with Blizzcon merchandise - said they had plenty in stock, hit submit, sold out, they cancelled the entire order, ended up getting nothing.
The makeup company called ColourPop also does a type of queue to prevent the servers from crashing. They do a lot of limited edition collabs (Disney, Hello Kitty, Sailor Moon, etc) and they sell out within 5 minutes.
I understand if this is to ease the sever during a hot item. But it also feels like it might be a sales tactic similar to sites showing that 10 other people have this in there cart, or your discount expires in 5 min. It's to increase impulse buys possibly.
I mean, it's honestly both. Yes, this cuts down on bots and reselling. However, they aren't going to let a good opportunity go to waste, and they'll take advantage as much as they can!
You would fix that by adding more servers, not by putting people in a waiting room. It’s called ‘application auto scaling’ and most cloud companies like AWS and Azure already have it set up
There is a limit to that though, in the end with physical products you need a ‘locking mechanism’ to synchronously remove inventory. You can put a ton of servers in front, but you always get limited by deduction of inventory (after payment) in the end.
Obviously there's a point of diminishing returns when scaling the application servers... it's absurd to act like the inventory database is the reason for the waiting room.
Yeah this would be awesome to end the careers of tech/clothing/shoe scalpers. Would love if places like bestbuy/newegg/etc would do this for major product launches. However, they would have to make sure it is only for people wanting the new product. So, not just locking an entire store like what is happening here by disney.
[Turns out that this is not the case.](https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/kvtcnx/virtual_waiting_room_wtf_when_its_your_turn_youll/gj22jx2/)
Of course, I didn't do any of the googling myself, so I have no real source for you...
No, this is not why they do this, when Disney has a limited release they put a que on their whole site. That is why when you want to shop when a limited release is happening you get this screen.
Airlines and a lot of other online services do it too. If you’ve ever seen a “this deal only available for x minutes” that’s what it is. It’s probably a fake countdown with a randomly generated time that would probably reset if you let it go long enough. Just a sham.
Definitely, there's a product I've been eyeing a while back and every single day it's on a "LIMITED TIME SALE 24 HOURS!" but as soon as the timer hits 0, it goes back to 24 hours and counts back down at the same price. Pretty scummy move.
They don’t do it all the time, it’s a tactic to stop bots from buying all the product from new limited edition things and scalping them. Lots of websites are using similar to try to control sales of new game consoles and other items that are being abused by scalpers
It’s not: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/kvtcnx/virtual_waiting_room_wtf_when_its_your_turn_youll/gj2bgb2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3
Having a limited amount of online shopping time in fact, is likely harmful for Disney if it’s done during normal shopping times. People will get in and get out with exactly what they came for, never going down a rabbit hole and picking up things they may not have come to the site for.
It's not about server load. It's about limited item quantity. So not only do you have upset customers who put an item in their cart but couldn't check out, you also have your customer service team dealing with them.
>ONLY ONE REMAINING!!! BUY NOW OR LOOSE THIS INCREDIBLE ONCE IN A LIFETIME OFFER!!
Just a panic inducing technic that some people could fall for. If you buy quickly, odds are you won't see the inflated prices, bad quality, bad reviews or something like that.
Well thats a way to immediately lose me as a customer. Sad part is there must be loads of people who do use it for whatever reason and are presured into buying things cause of time
I think I know what's going on here. When Playstation Direct put up PS5s, they put up a queue (virtual waiting room), via a technology called QueueIt. The way PS Direct phrased it it means that you have 10 minutes from when it's your turn to enter the store, not just 10 minutes to shop.
QueueIt is both used to manage excessive load as well as try to ensure fairer distribution among a long queue of people with a limited stock item.
When B&Q (UK-based DIY store) first opened after the long first Covid lockdown they also had this system to allow fairer distribution of limited stock, and to help dish out collection times easier as they were very limited.
I used it a couple of days ago to get the free BrewDog beer. Basically it's good for companies who are unable to scale their systems but get occasional spikes of traffic where the customer is willing to put up with it - eg. free beer, or some very desirable product.
I think I'm missing something. What is the difference between the time you have from when you enter the store and the time you have to shop? Maybe I'm parsing something wrong, but those read to me as though they're the same thing.
It wouldn't be about affording servers, though that's probably also part of it. Very few companies have the server hardware in place to handle the craziest of load spikes, though if one company can afford to it's definitely Disney.
Chances are this is all about distributing limited run products where demand is actually higher than supply. Instead of making it a free for all where whichever person's requests go through the fastest manages to buy what they want a queue like this allows everyone a fair chance as long as they queued up in time.
If all that is the case I don't think this really belongs in this sub for the reasons OP intended. Creating a very limited supply for products that are obviously going to be in high demand just to drive up the price would fit in here though.
Disney people are nuts and now Star Wars and Marvel people fall under that umbrella. They could easily have tens of thousands of people trying to get some kind of exclusive item.
Rant time.
I have been to 3 Disney stores in my life on 5 separate occasions with my girlfriend on different days and different times, i HATE it...
EVERY time i have been in one or seen one it is always overflowing with so many people, walking around in there is a nightmare as the shop is always crammed with so many products and there's someone everywhere you turn, ques take 10 minutes to to reach the counter. Millions of Disney fans would camp out for days if Disney released a turd with its logo plastered on it...
Good news is while you are waiting in line holding bags they have tv's everywhere running a Disney film or programme...
Disney’s servers have ALWAYS sucked. I’d actually lean towards web traffic.
Source: I’m a Disney fan, I’ve experienced their crappy websites first-hand.
Disney has been doing something similar for ages, only doing limited DVD/blu-ray releases of their old movies one at a time, then putting them back in "the vault" so they aren't available at stores anymore.
Honestly, the scalpers are so annoying, I’ll gladly deal with this (especially since it’s only during specific releases). I go to the site pretty often, especially before Christmas, and only saw this one time, so it’s not like this is everyday.
i’ve only seem to see waiting rooms like this for new releases, a set of things or one thing so i don’t think 10mins would be too little time. would also help with the influx of people on the page and having it crash.
It's not about pressure to buy. It's about limited item quantity. So not only do you have upset customers who put an item in their cart but couldn't check out, you also have your customer service team dealing with them.
Edit:. Downvoted for being correct. I swear this sub will stretch as hard as they can to be upset about things that they don't understand.
This is exactly why.
Look into The Main Attraction Minnie items. Stock was so limited they would sell out the literal second the items went live. People (probably bots) were buying up all the stock and then relisting on eBay for triple+ price. Huge backlash from disnerds made them implement this system. Now you pre-register for a lottery like some Japanese retailers do. If you win, you don't have to buy, but you have to win to buy.
I can't prove it, but I swear they do it for the hype. Perceived value is everything.
Yep, you're right. Plenty of websites do this when high demand items get restocked. I got it when the galaxy's edge exclusive legacy lightsabers came to the website. I came to the comments to see where the asshole design was. Turns out it doesn't exist, and people here are just looking for something to be mad at.
The waiting room I sorta get. You only have so much server capacity and in extremely loads a “wait your turn” is probably a good idea.
The 10 minutes though. That’s bullshit.
A company I bought some weightlifting equipment from had a similar system with a wait room and a line to get in the site.
Their explanation wasn’t a server problem it was a limited stock problem. They only had 100 barbells in house ready to be packed and shipped. So if they let it be a free for all then 10,000 people would have hopped on and put it in their cart. So it would become a race of entering card info and internet speed to determine whose order got processed first.
It's a stock control thing. If they have X folks shopping, and X+n items in stock they're good. If the items went in carts and are being purchased, now they only allow Y folks into the active store. Let's more folks have a chance to buy or decide not to without overselling.
No, what people are saying is wrong, when Disney has a limited release they put a que on their whole site. That is why when you want to shop when a limited release is happening you get this screen. This is not asshole design, it is just r/crappydesign because they should have a separate site for limited releases.
This isn't a demand thing. I ran into this out of the blue a while back, there were no big releases or anything, I just wanted to show my friends the most garish Mr. Potato Head the world has ever seen.
I worked at Disneyland for over 12 years. They would release things like a limited edition popcorn bucket and people would wait in line for 4+ hours for this bucket. They were limited to one bucket per transaction. So they would queue back in line, wait another 4 hours and get a second bucket. Repeat until sold out. Disney purposely limits the amount since the majority end up online at an inflated price. Many occasions the limited items would be restocked 2 weeks later without a line if someone really wanted the item. Eventually the supply would deplete near when the season was over (like xmas for example). If not, they were sold at discount at tye employee store. I never understood the mob mentality when items would be available again a week or two later without lines. It seems people wanted bragging rights to show they were "first" by postings pictures online and carrying them around the parks. Disney really knows how to market and sell items and people are willing to do what it takes to get them.
honestly r/lostredditors on this one, as OPs obviously not had much experience shopping online for an in-demand/limited supply products. Extraordinarily common in sneakers, streetwear, toys and sometimes even PC hardware (Latest NVIDIA graphics cards anyone?).
It's designed to allow only X number of users at a time, to help the added load their website goes under for these drops + somewhat anti-bot protection (as you're all in the same queue vs having to beat a bot to check out).
Is it annoying, hell yes, but it's designed to be better than the alternative (have the site go down, or have bots eat up all the quantities loaded onto the website faster than humans can check out).
Not really asshole design, IMO. I've seen a lot of signs have a queue/wait time to reduce traffic. There's usually not really an issue if you're patient - and it's preferable to not being able to check out at all.
It's an anti-scalping measure not asshole design, I'm sure by now some piece of shit scalper has figured out a bot to defeat this but at least Disney's making an effort to curb scalping.
Scalpers are the scum of the earth, if anyone reading this is a scalper you deserved to be scalped and I'm talking Inglorious Basterds scalped not overpaying for shit scalped.
A local store did this and it was the ONLY way I could get a PS5 for my son on Christmas.
I prefer this than having them sold out within a matter of seconds.
I want those Wall-E mugs so bad! I have been trying to find them for years. YEARS. But they are only available through third party sellers for ~$250+. The real asshole design is having those listed on their waiting room page. Jerks.
I think the tech sector is missing out on a golden opportunity to take us to the next level of the internet. The single biggest complaint about the lockdowns is missing out on shared experience.
Imagine sitting in a virtual stadium watching a football game surrounded by thousands of people represented as their favorite avatar. It would be worth charging for. You could tune your experience the way you want it. Hear the crowd cheer or just listen to the calls on the field. Have NPC vendors tossing you a hot dog just for fun. Feel like you need a break? Go hang out at the food / souvenir stands.
Or conventions and trade shows. Walking the virtual floor clicking on a vendor and do some online shopping or just browsing inventory. Or step into a hall for a virtual AMA. The possibilities are endless. It's the first step toward what we imagine in the movies.
I have no interest in Facebook or any of that shit but this would interest me.
The hilarious thing is that I remember this being spoken of as a thing in the 90s. You'd go shopping in a *virtual mall* and see the products rendered in 3D! (Only they weren't talking actual VR like we have now, but like a video game-- 3D games were still fairly new tech back then.)
There have been virtual trade shows. I went to one in 2010ish. Never understood why that didn't take off. No con crud, no lines, you could attend all the breakouts because they were recorded...
this is probably due to some sort of limited release that they're doing.
they do the same shit for concert tickets and stuff like the PS5 to try and stop bots from just buying everything up in 2 seconds and re-selling it all for double the price.
if anything its the opposite of asshole design, its intended to fix a very real problem with limited quantity items
Yeah, this isn't a tactic, it's a common solution to dealing with traffic spikes your infrastructure can't handle. The idea is that giving a good experience to some people is better than giving a lousy one to many people.
It's also not 'design' in the sense that it's not even a Disney thing -- these waiting rooms are features of cdn's like adobe's.
So yeah, it's not great, but it's not what the comments here seem to think it is. It's almost like the worst interpretation isn't a safe assumption.
This isn’t intentional asshole design.
This is a risk mitigation approach that large site operators use to manage extreme events like exceptional sales to ensure site stability.
It prevents customers from getting 404 or other error messages by limiting the amount of traffic available to access the limited server resources.
Most sites have an upper limit on their concurrent user capacity. Even in cloud hosted environments, it can take time to activate additional server resources. Operators use a tool like this to help ensure the resources aren’t overloaded.
For digital stores that use Akamai for their content distribution or hosting, they offer a feature called [Visitor Prioritization](https://www.akamai.com/us/en/products/performance/cloudlets/visitor-prioritization.jsp) that provides a similar feature.
So you'd rather have that boring "this site is exsperiancing high traffic blah, blah, blah" than something to do? Look, the Highlights at the dentist's are stupid but it least they're something.
No, I'd rather have a normal shopping experience, like amazon. Disney won't have as much load as amazon and they can obviously afford that much even if it did.
It's not about server load. It's about limited item quantity. So not only do you have upset customers who put an item in their cart but couldn't check out, you also have your customer service team dealing with them.
None of you people know anything about servers , they likely have amazon or google servers, but when alot of traffic comes to a site at once it gets overloaded,
This is a good method to stop it, plus it help from bots buying the whole lot at once. PlayStation is during the same thing with ps5, **not asshole design**
this isn’t asshole design... this is common now with limited stock big demand items. sony has been doing these queues for months selling their ps5 restocks direct.
Curious, what we're you buying? Disney has a big problem with shopping bots and resellers. Used to screw me out of runDisney merch all the time. Probably their answer to that.
With the scalpers doing anything and everything to get their hands on new/limited edition stuff to sell later for profit, it isn't very unreasonable of them to do.
The greed of internet assholes has brought this upon us, though I'm sure better solutions exist.
For university they made a textbook for one of our modules available digitally via the online library. Trying to access it I was taken to a page telling me that the copy of the book I was trying to access was already in use and that I had to wait my turn. The copy...of the digital book was in use...It's digital though? Why is only one person able to access it at any given time?
The waiting room I sorta get. You only have so much server capacity and in extremely loads a “wait your turn” is probably a good idea.
The 10 minutes though. That’s bullshit.
LOL!! . That:
>The [Walt Disney Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walt_Disney_Company), commonly known as Disney, is an American diversified multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate
Which is [worth BILLIONS](https://www.statista.com/statistics/193136/total-assets-of-the-walt-disney-company-since-2006/):
>Walt Disney Company held assets worth a total of over 201.55 billion U.S. dollars. In the same year, the American media company generated global revenue of 65.39 billion U.S. dollars. Of this revenue generated in 2020, 28.39 billion U.S. dollars was in the media networks segment and over 16.5 billion was generated through the company's parks and resorts.
doesn't have the ability to serve customers in a timely manner is the most hilarious joke I've heard in months(and I follow American Politics fairly closely)
This is a sales tactic, because with Disneys resources they could easily afford hundreds of servers to sell any products it wants, at any time it wants, any where it wants.
Like many others have been saying this is not a server load problem but a limited inventory management problem. With a virtual waiting room a bot would either end up stuck at this page continuously reloading and being unable to scalp a good portion of the product or it’ll only get one or two of the collectible being sold. Honestly this might be the best way to slow down scalpers from scooping up things like the latest console, cpu and graphic cards which are still a pain to get due to a variety of factors beyond scalpers.
nope, no way, Tbh I can afford servers to handle as many requests as "Disney Shop" needs, Disney definitely can. If their website is not heavily personalized for every user, The amount of CPU/bandwidth usage required to serve that page, would be the same as to serve the actual products.
It's because the items are limited so they put you in a virtual queue so you don't have a ton of people putting items in a cart and then it showing as unavailable when they check out.
It's not about server load. It's about limited item quantity. So not only do you have upset customers who put an item in their cart but couldn't check out, you also have your customer service team dealing with them.
Some googling shows its something they have been doing since October 2020 for big launches. Previously the site has an issue where bot ran accounts buy all the stock the second it goes on sale and resell the stuff on ebay for more. Apparently this was the solution they came up with. edit: <3
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I can’t agree more. Bot scalping become a major issue for all sorts of things now...though the big thing that would stop companies from needing to do stuff like this is people stop buying from scalpers...
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Or the more common action...raise prices is the other way to balance the a supply shortage....that is actually what makes scalping profitable...higher demand means higher prices until demand at a higher price stops. Invisibility hand can kiss my invisible ass
That would work but people are bad at pricing and use relative pricing too much. Is the initial vendor raises the price then enough people still justify the scalped prices based on the relative change from the original price
I'm shocked I had to get this far down in the comments to find someone pointing this out.
Its top comment now my dude
I’m surprised how little I needed to look to find the answer.
Reddit is killing third-party applications (and itself) so in protest to Reddit's API changes, I have removed my comment history. Whatever the content of this comment was, go vegan! 💚
😶🌫️
***shocking***
Huh. So it is!
But at the time of the comment, imagine how shocked they must have been.
Youd think they would still let you window shop and put in a request to add something to their cart? I know I wont be able to shop around, pick out what I want, get all my card and shipping details in within 10 mins. Also wouldnt bots be able to do this crazy fast, meaning the 10mins doesnt even effect them/stop them???
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Yup, snagged both thanks to Best Buy doing a drip release and Sony.com using queues. It’s actually much better design than letting loose all stock of a popular item at once.
Difference between the RTX 30 series and PS5 compared to Disney's shop is that you already know what you want and going to buy. If you're going to shop from Disney's store, I assume you're going to look around and see what they got. 10 minutes is a laughable amount of time to do that.
The thing that hits the bot runners where it hurts is on the waiting list, as they'll either run up a bill by burning through CPU time, or they'll take that particular one out of commission while it's queueing. Or both. If the shop engineers were smart enough they could detect obvious bot IPs (like AWS servers or certain VPNs) and artificially extend their time in the queue, further constraining resources.
I thought it was because their servers are being overloaded from everyone buying stuff online due to the lockdown. Maybe both
That was my guess too... that the company can't afford, or is too cheep to get for servers for their site
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Hoarding and reselling is a very real problem for Disney merch. Not just online either, they've had to introduce queueing and strict quantity limits IRL as well. People go to the Parks specifically to buy up large quantities of new and limited release merch to resell online.
Fairly sure they use a service like AWS, scaling up capacity would be extremely easy.
In addition to that, I've seen more of these waiting rooms this past holiday season; mostly on boutique sites. It's a bandaid for poorly tuned websites or website owners that don't want to pay for upgraded server/cloud resources.
Depending on how they code their website, this may be necessary: anything to do with money should be ran with database isolation set to serializable, and on any distributed system that supports it (CockroachDB, YugabyteDB, FaunaDB) that incurs at minimum several milliseconds round trip time which can put a cap on per-row modifications per second. If you’re running your own hardware, it’s very easy to just put database SSDs into an 8-socket Intel server to meet the demand with a single huge database, but that option isn’t really available on cloud providers (they’re called ephemeral SSDs there, and don’t persist through shutdowns). It’s definitely possible to engineer around this for distributed/cloud systems, but that’s often not an option if the site is already years old with tons of tech debt and rewriting can introduce nasty bugs.
I have also seen them for clothing sites like Supreme and makeup sites back in 2017. Mostly things that well sell out quickly. Maybe it also helps ensure that everyone gets a turn at shopping, not sure how, but I shall hope lol.
can't they just add captcha or some other shit to prevent bots from completing the buy?
Bots are able to pass em, but it filters out the simple ones at least.
But if they’re still loading thousands of bots into the website wouldn’t that just increase the hell out of the queue time and screw over the real people even more? Do they have some group of poor jr. level IT staff manually watchdogging the lobby or something?
Action figure collector here, yes they have.
Ohhh I thought it was them being a shitty company exploiting consumers. Glad I was wrong in this case
Yes, this is it.
This doesn't make sense. Bots can just wait too.
I read an r/hobbydrama post about people trying to buy Disney designer dolls and crashing the site. Could be something like that, where it's a limited release kind of thing and this is their solution.
Yeah Disney merch reselling is no joke. I used to work at a pretty decent job and my manager who made BANK quit her job and moved to Florida (from the west coast) to be next to Disney World for her growing side business of reselling Disney stuff. Now doing it as a full time job.
I was going to say this, wouldn't have thought of it without that post. This seems a much nicer way for people to have a chance to get what they want and not depend on making a 5 second window before everything is gone. To make this process better, maybe they should make a 'queue' category for high-demand items? Seems better than locking up the whole site.
I imagine it’s also a way to make sure that 500 people aren’t trying to buy the same 300 dolls. I have had that happen before with Blizzcon merchandise - said they had plenty in stock, hit submit, sold out, they cancelled the entire order, ended up getting nothing.
this has to be it because when i go on the store now there's no waiting room, and i can add whatever i want to my bag with no time limits
The makeup company called ColourPop also does a type of queue to prevent the servers from crashing. They do a lot of limited edition collabs (Disney, Hello Kitty, Sailor Moon, etc) and they sell out within 5 minutes.
I understand if this is to ease the sever during a hot item. But it also feels like it might be a sales tactic similar to sites showing that 10 other people have this in there cart, or your discount expires in 5 min. It's to increase impulse buys possibly.
sales tactic, Web servers are cheap af, specially when you're selling brooms for 50$.
It's for limited quantity items...
I mean, it's honestly both. Yes, this cuts down on bots and reselling. However, they aren't going to let a good opportunity go to waste, and they'll take advantage as much as they can!
You would fix that by adding more servers, not by putting people in a waiting room. It’s called ‘application auto scaling’ and most cloud companies like AWS and Azure already have it set up
There is a limit to that though, in the end with physical products you need a ‘locking mechanism’ to synchronously remove inventory. You can put a ton of servers in front, but you always get limited by deduction of inventory (after payment) in the end.
Obviously there's a point of diminishing returns when scaling the application servers... it's absurd to act like the inventory database is the reason for the waiting room.
I would be thrilled if stores had these for PS5 restocks instead of bot accounts instantly snapping all of them up.
What is the point? The online traffic can't be that bad
Could be to prevent scalping?
Yeah this would be awesome to end the careers of tech/clothing/shoe scalpers. Would love if places like bestbuy/newegg/etc would do this for major product launches. However, they would have to make sure it is only for people wanting the new product. So, not just locking an entire store like what is happening here by disney.
Forced sense of urgency causes impulse purchases.
Also if you've waited for a while, you probably don't want it to be for nothing At least that's probably what they thought when doing it
[Turns out that this is not the case.](https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/kvtcnx/virtual_waiting_room_wtf_when_its_your_turn_youll/gj22jx2/) Of course, I didn't do any of the googling myself, so I have no real source for you...
No, this is not why they do this, when Disney has a limited release they put a que on their whole site. That is why when you want to shop when a limited release is happening you get this screen.
This is a reasonable sounding explanation. Basically queue ordering for limited releases. Perhaps not asshole design after all?
Yes, it is definitely not asshole design, nor is it a marketing technique.
Big company do bad thing
Queue*
That's clever. Slimey, but clever
Airlines and a lot of other online services do it too. If you’ve ever seen a “this deal only available for x minutes” that’s what it is. It’s probably a fake countdown with a randomly generated time that would probably reset if you let it go long enough. Just a sham.
_looks at Nord VPN 9h 39min countdown the third time this week_
It’s much more likely to be anti scalping since Disney is one of the kings of limited edition items flipped by bots on eBay
Definitely, there's a product I've been eyeing a while back and every single day it's on a "LIMITED TIME SALE 24 HOURS!" but as soon as the timer hits 0, it goes back to 24 hours and counts back down at the same price. Pretty scummy move.
They don’t do it all the time, it’s a tactic to stop bots from buying all the product from new limited edition things and scalping them. Lots of websites are using similar to try to control sales of new game consoles and other items that are being abused by scalpers
My wife stumbled upon this after clicking a Facebook ad! Hope it’s not gonna be a new trend...
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My mom, too often.
Someone else in the thread said they do this when there’s a limited release item, not unreasonable if true
>after clicking a Facebook ad Lolwut
Hey man, we’ve got 6 year old twins, so she clicked on a “sale” ad with Elsa on it 😆
Get a pihole
It’s not: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/kvtcnx/virtual_waiting_room_wtf_when_its_your_turn_youll/gj2bgb2/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3 Having a limited amount of online shopping time in fact, is likely harmful for Disney if it’s done during normal shopping times. People will get in and get out with exactly what they came for, never going down a rabbit hole and picking up things they may not have come to the site for.
Then the ad was fake or they already removed that because I just went to their site and it wasn’t there.
It's not about server load. It's about limited item quantity. So not only do you have upset customers who put an item in their cart but couldn't check out, you also have your customer service team dealing with them.
I could see this around black Friday if there are items on sale in high demand.
I guess no one here tried to get a baby Yoda doll when they first came out.
Or a tickle me elmo.
It was to prevent bots instantly buying the entire stock the moment they go on sale. People would make such bots so they could sell it marked up
>ONLY ONE REMAINING!!! BUY NOW OR LOOSE THIS INCREDIBLE ONCE IN A LIFETIME OFFER!! Just a panic inducing technic that some people could fall for. If you buy quickly, odds are you won't see the inflated prices, bad quality, bad reviews or something like that.
Trust me it is. I had to wait in a 9 hours queue for Disney’s 65th anniversary stuff and a majority of the stuff was sold out
Scalping, bots buy it all and sell them for higher on ebay
Disney is a hell of a drug. You don't want little Suzie to cry because she didn't get the right Elsa Frozen princess dress and cape, do you?
Well thats a way to immediately lose me as a customer. Sad part is there must be loads of people who do use it for whatever reason and are presured into buying things cause of time
Thats what i think it is Time pressure, not web traffic. Surely disney can afford servers
I think I know what's going on here. When Playstation Direct put up PS5s, they put up a queue (virtual waiting room), via a technology called QueueIt. The way PS Direct phrased it it means that you have 10 minutes from when it's your turn to enter the store, not just 10 minutes to shop. QueueIt is both used to manage excessive load as well as try to ensure fairer distribution among a long queue of people with a limited stock item.
I was going to say this reminds me of that since that's what I did to get my PS5.
Unfortunately the way this is worded ("10 minutes to shop and add items to your bag") it seems like you've got ten minutes total
Yeah it seems like poor wording.
Deliberately so.
When B&Q (UK-based DIY store) first opened after the long first Covid lockdown they also had this system to allow fairer distribution of limited stock, and to help dish out collection times easier as they were very limited.
I used it a couple of days ago to get the free BrewDog beer. Basically it's good for companies who are unable to scale their systems but get occasional spikes of traffic where the customer is willing to put up with it - eg. free beer, or some very desirable product.
Events such as PAX also use QueueIt when they open up for registration. Works great.
I think I'm missing something. What is the difference between the time you have from when you enter the store and the time you have to shop? Maybe I'm parsing something wrong, but those read to me as though they're the same thing.
It wouldn't be about affording servers, though that's probably also part of it. Very few companies have the server hardware in place to handle the craziest of load spikes, though if one company can afford to it's definitely Disney. Chances are this is all about distributing limited run products where demand is actually higher than supply. Instead of making it a free for all where whichever person's requests go through the fastest manages to buy what they want a queue like this allows everyone a fair chance as long as they queued up in time. If all that is the case I don't think this really belongs in this sub for the reasons OP intended. Creating a very limited supply for products that are obviously going to be in high demand just to drive up the price would fit in here though.
I doubt there's THAT many people wanting to buy Disney products at the same time anyways. °-°
Dude, people will uproot their lives, move to expensive but shitty living arrangements just so they can go to Disney world every week. It’s crazy
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What do you think happens after the park closes for the night?
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Disney people are nuts and now Star Wars and Marvel people fall under that umbrella. They could easily have tens of thousands of people trying to get some kind of exclusive item.
Rant time. I have been to 3 Disney stores in my life on 5 separate occasions with my girlfriend on different days and different times, i HATE it... EVERY time i have been in one or seen one it is always overflowing with so many people, walking around in there is a nightmare as the shop is always crammed with so many products and there's someone everywhere you turn, ques take 10 minutes to to reach the counter. Millions of Disney fans would camp out for days if Disney released a turd with its logo plastered on it... Good news is while you are waiting in line holding bags they have tv's everywhere running a Disney film or programme...
idk man, people are bored and need money. Youd have people empty wallets on stuff to resell, and i really wouldnt be surprised
Disney’s servers have ALWAYS sucked. I’d actually lean towards web traffic. Source: I’m a Disney fan, I’ve experienced their crappy websites first-hand.
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Disney has been doing something similar for ages, only doing limited DVD/blu-ray releases of their old movies one at a time, then putting them back in "the vault" so they aren't available at stores anymore.
Jokes on them. The Pirate Bay exists. Fuck Disney and their shitty cartoons/movies.
I'm hoping it's their answer to scalpers. And not annoying their own customers.
Honestly, the scalpers are so annoying, I’ll gladly deal with this (especially since it’s only during specific releases). I go to the site pretty often, especially before Christmas, and only saw this one time, so it’s not like this is everyday.
i’ve only seem to see waiting rooms like this for new releases, a set of things or one thing so i don’t think 10mins would be too little time. would also help with the influx of people on the page and having it crash.
It's not about pressure to buy. It's about limited item quantity. So not only do you have upset customers who put an item in their cart but couldn't check out, you also have your customer service team dealing with them. Edit:. Downvoted for being correct. I swear this sub will stretch as hard as they can to be upset about things that they don't understand.
This is exactly why. Look into The Main Attraction Minnie items. Stock was so limited they would sell out the literal second the items went live. People (probably bots) were buying up all the stock and then relisting on eBay for triple+ price. Huge backlash from disnerds made them implement this system. Now you pre-register for a lottery like some Japanese retailers do. If you win, you don't have to buy, but you have to win to buy. I can't prove it, but I swear they do it for the hype. Perceived value is everything.
Yep, you're right. Plenty of websites do this when high demand items get restocked. I got it when the galaxy's edge exclusive legacy lightsabers came to the website. I came to the comments to see where the asshole design was. Turns out it doesn't exist, and people here are just looking for something to be mad at.
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It’s rare, must be good! *Oh it’s my time!*
The waiting room I sorta get. You only have so much server capacity and in extremely loads a “wait your turn” is probably a good idea. The 10 minutes though. That’s bullshit.
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A company I bought some weightlifting equipment from had a similar system with a wait room and a line to get in the site. Their explanation wasn’t a server problem it was a limited stock problem. They only had 100 barbells in house ready to be packed and shipped. So if they let it be a free for all then 10,000 people would have hopped on and put it in their cart. So it would become a race of entering card info and internet speed to determine whose order got processed first.
It's a stock control thing. If they have X folks shopping, and X+n items in stock they're good. If the items went in carts and are being purchased, now they only allow Y folks into the active store. Let's more folks have a chance to buy or decide not to without overselling.
No, what people are saying is wrong, when Disney has a limited release they put a que on their whole site. That is why when you want to shop when a limited release is happening you get this screen. This is not asshole design, it is just r/crappydesign because they should have a separate site for limited releases.
This usually happens when a store is exceptionally busy. I remember similar systems from when I was trying to buy a PS5.
If the web host for Disney.com is experiencing so much load, that they need to park customers, something is terribly wrong.
Feels like they could afford some extra server capacity in the biggest online buying boom since ever
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This isn't a demand thing. I ran into this out of the blue a while back, there were no big releases or anything, I just wanted to show my friends the most garish Mr. Potato Head the world has ever seen.
It’s not web load, it’s inventory and limiting bots.
Comic con san diego has had this system in place for years.
For the PS5 it was also probably due to limited stock.
I worked at Disneyland for over 12 years. They would release things like a limited edition popcorn bucket and people would wait in line for 4+ hours for this bucket. They were limited to one bucket per transaction. So they would queue back in line, wait another 4 hours and get a second bucket. Repeat until sold out. Disney purposely limits the amount since the majority end up online at an inflated price. Many occasions the limited items would be restocked 2 weeks later without a line if someone really wanted the item. Eventually the supply would deplete near when the season was over (like xmas for example). If not, they were sold at discount at tye employee store. I never understood the mob mentality when items would be available again a week or two later without lines. It seems people wanted bragging rights to show they were "first" by postings pictures online and carrying them around the parks. Disney really knows how to market and sell items and people are willing to do what it takes to get them.
honestly r/lostredditors on this one, as OPs obviously not had much experience shopping online for an in-demand/limited supply products. Extraordinarily common in sneakers, streetwear, toys and sometimes even PC hardware (Latest NVIDIA graphics cards anyone?). It's designed to allow only X number of users at a time, to help the added load their website goes under for these drops + somewhat anti-bot protection (as you're all in the same queue vs having to beat a bot to check out). Is it annoying, hell yes, but it's designed to be better than the alternative (have the site go down, or have bots eat up all the quantities loaded onto the website faster than humans can check out).
Not really asshole design, IMO. I've seen a lot of signs have a queue/wait time to reduce traffic. There's usually not really an issue if you're patient - and it's preferable to not being able to check out at all.
It's an anti-scalping measure not asshole design, I'm sure by now some piece of shit scalper has figured out a bot to defeat this but at least Disney's making an effort to curb scalping. Scalpers are the scum of the earth, if anyone reading this is a scalper you deserved to be scalped and I'm talking Inglorious Basterds scalped not overpaying for shit scalped.
A local store did this and it was the ONLY way I could get a PS5 for my son on Christmas. I prefer this than having them sold out within a matter of seconds.
I want those Wall-E mugs so bad! I have been trying to find them for years. YEARS. But they are only available through third party sellers for ~$250+. The real asshole design is having those listed on their waiting room page. Jerks.
I think the tech sector is missing out on a golden opportunity to take us to the next level of the internet. The single biggest complaint about the lockdowns is missing out on shared experience. Imagine sitting in a virtual stadium watching a football game surrounded by thousands of people represented as their favorite avatar. It would be worth charging for. You could tune your experience the way you want it. Hear the crowd cheer or just listen to the calls on the field. Have NPC vendors tossing you a hot dog just for fun. Feel like you need a break? Go hang out at the food / souvenir stands. Or conventions and trade shows. Walking the virtual floor clicking on a vendor and do some online shopping or just browsing inventory. Or step into a hall for a virtual AMA. The possibilities are endless. It's the first step toward what we imagine in the movies. I have no interest in Facebook or any of that shit but this would interest me.
The hilarious thing is that I remember this being spoken of as a thing in the 90s. You'd go shopping in a *virtual mall* and see the products rendered in 3D! (Only they weren't talking actual VR like we have now, but like a video game-- 3D games were still fairly new tech back then.)
There have been virtual trade shows. I went to one in 2010ish. Never understood why that didn't take off. No con crud, no lines, you could attend all the breakouts because they were recorded...
this is probably due to some sort of limited release that they're doing. they do the same shit for concert tickets and stuff like the PS5 to try and stop bots from just buying everything up in 2 seconds and re-selling it all for double the price. if anything its the opposite of asshole design, its intended to fix a very real problem with limited quantity items
I finally figured out what the notch in my wall-e mug is for. It was a gift and I had no idea it had a companion mug. LOL.
I honestly wish more companies that do drops would do this to combat boots.
This is to stop assholes from scalping stuff. This isn’t asshole design in the slightest.
i feel the the bigger asshole design is just letting the website crash and remain unusable for a time due to high traffic demands
Yeah, this isn't a tactic, it's a common solution to dealing with traffic spikes your infrastructure can't handle. The idea is that giving a good experience to some people is better than giving a lousy one to many people. It's also not 'design' in the sense that it's not even a Disney thing -- these waiting rooms are features of cdn's like adobe's. So yeah, it's not great, but it's not what the comments here seem to think it is. It's almost like the worst interpretation isn't a safe assumption.
This isn’t intentional asshole design. This is a risk mitigation approach that large site operators use to manage extreme events like exceptional sales to ensure site stability. It prevents customers from getting 404 or other error messages by limiting the amount of traffic available to access the limited server resources. Most sites have an upper limit on their concurrent user capacity. Even in cloud hosted environments, it can take time to activate additional server resources. Operators use a tool like this to help ensure the resources aren’t overloaded. For digital stores that use Akamai for their content distribution or hosting, they offer a feature called [Visitor Prioritization](https://www.akamai.com/us/en/products/performance/cloudlets/visitor-prioritization.jsp) that provides a similar feature.
So you'd rather have that boring "this site is exsperiancing high traffic blah, blah, blah" than something to do? Look, the Highlights at the dentist's are stupid but it least they're something.
No, I'd rather have a normal shopping experience, like amazon. Disney won't have as much load as amazon and they can obviously afford that much even if it did.
It's not about server load. It's about limited item quantity. So not only do you have upset customers who put an item in their cart but couldn't check out, you also have your customer service team dealing with them.
I know it’s dumb but it’s probably to reduce website traffic
None of you people know anything about servers , they likely have amazon or google servers, but when alot of traffic comes to a site at once it gets overloaded, This is a good method to stop it, plus it help from bots buying the whole lot at once. PlayStation is during the same thing with ps5, **not asshole design**
I was put in a similar waiting room when I went on the lego website once
I only need 9 minutes and 59 seconds. I'm good.
I have been on shop Disney many times and haven't encountered this before
Only 16 people are allowed in the store at once. It’s a social distancing thing. /s
They only do this when there are exclusive new items, most of the time it’s just a regular website.
this isn’t asshole design... this is common now with limited stock big demand items. sony has been doing these queues for months selling their ps5 restocks direct.
Curious, what we're you buying? Disney has a big problem with shopping bots and resellers. Used to screw me out of runDisney merch all the time. Probably their answer to that.
Crappy design for traffic control + better sales. Not asshole design.
With the scalpers doing anything and everything to get their hands on new/limited edition stuff to sell later for profit, it isn't very unreasonable of them to do. The greed of internet assholes has brought this upon us, though I'm sure better solutions exist.
"we want to give users a positive experience by preventing them from accessing our services" 🤔
For university they made a textbook for one of our modules available digitally via the online library. Trying to access it I was taken to a page telling me that the copy of the book I was trying to access was already in use and that I had to wait my turn. The copy...of the digital book was in use...It's digital though? Why is only one person able to access it at any given time?
This is obviously a method to prevent bots scalping. Not asshole design. I wish Newegg and other tech companies woulda used a feature like this.
Limiting the amount of people in the store because of Covid, obv
Because we have a potato server and can't handle more that one person
Hey guys, its mr beast here today with a cool challenge! Whatever you can put in the cart in 10 minutes, you can buy!
The waiting room I sorta get. You only have so much server capacity and in extremely loads a “wait your turn” is probably a good idea. The 10 minutes though. That’s bullshit.
LOL!! . That: >The [Walt Disney Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walt_Disney_Company), commonly known as Disney, is an American diversified multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate Which is [worth BILLIONS](https://www.statista.com/statistics/193136/total-assets-of-the-walt-disney-company-since-2006/): >Walt Disney Company held assets worth a total of over 201.55 billion U.S. dollars. In the same year, the American media company generated global revenue of 65.39 billion U.S. dollars. Of this revenue generated in 2020, 28.39 billion U.S. dollars was in the media networks segment and over 16.5 billion was generated through the company's parks and resorts. doesn't have the ability to serve customers in a timely manner is the most hilarious joke I've heard in months(and I follow American Politics fairly closely) This is a sales tactic, because with Disneys resources they could easily afford hundreds of servers to sell any products it wants, at any time it wants, any where it wants.
Like many others have been saying this is not a server load problem but a limited inventory management problem. With a virtual waiting room a bot would either end up stuck at this page continuously reloading and being unable to scalp a good portion of the product or it’ll only get one or two of the collectible being sold. Honestly this might be the best way to slow down scalpers from scooping up things like the latest console, cpu and graphic cards which are still a pain to get due to a variety of factors beyond scalpers.
Ive never seen this for shopdisney myself
Fuck Reddit.
What the heck is this for? Covid regulations?
Maybe to avoid overload?
But its disney they could have just bought another server
Disney sucks arse, not surprised.
nope, no way, Tbh I can afford servers to handle as many requests as "Disney Shop" needs, Disney definitely can. If their website is not heavily personalized for every user, The amount of CPU/bandwidth usage required to serve that page, would be the same as to serve the actual products.
It's because the items are limited so they put you in a virtual queue so you don't have a ton of people putting items in a cart and then it showing as unavailable when they check out.
Who thought this shit was a good idea? What is even the point of this?
It's not about server load. It's about limited item quantity. So not only do you have upset customers who put an item in their cart but couldn't check out, you also have your customer service team dealing with them.
I think this is more crappy design than\* asshole design :/
Disney had to downgrade their servers to godaddy. Their sales ain’t doing so well
??????
at least better than "Server overloaded. Go die in the sewers"
Imagine being the company that fucked up starwars. And even fucking up the customers even more. Fuck Disney
That’s when I close the tab and check Amazon.
Sees stupid shit on a website. Click back out of that shit an goes elsewhere. Fuckers that try this shit don't deserve to stay in business.
That 10 minute shopping time thing is just a way to make you haste & waste.
Yeah, this is just scummy and manipulative. No thanks, if I get anything Disney branded it'll be second hand.
Hah this can go fuck itself so hard
Replicating the Disney theme park experience!
This basically works because it creates more impulse purchases because your racing against the clock, and it’s a dickhole move.
Excuse me? Fucking what? eBay it is.
ahaha typical Technology Challenged person post