What your customers see
Joining the waitlist
The join page is where almost every customer starts. It is a short form on a page branded as yours, and getting it right — asking for the right things and no more — is the single biggest influence on how many people actually use your waitlist.
The address
/q/your-branch for a specific location. A QR code created for a branch points straight here, so scanning it skips any branch selection.
You can also use your business short name — /q/your-business. For a single-site business that resolves to your only branch. For a chain it hands off to the branch directory so the customer can pick, which is what you want on a link shared across a whole company's social profiles.
What the form asks
Out of the box: a name and a mobile number. That is deliberate — the number is what makes the whole thing work, and every extra field costs you people who give up part-way.
Beyond that you decide. Under Location settingsCustomer details you can add your own fields, switch on the email address field, relabel what is there and set the order. Name and mobile number can be relabelled and reordered but not removed — without them there is nobody to call and no way to call them. See registration fields.
Depending on your setup the visitor may also choose a queue, choose a service, or give a party size.
Asking to market to them
If you have switched marketing consent on, the form carries a tick box with wording you control. It is unticked, it is optional, and joining works whether or not they agree.
What gets stored is not just a yes — it is the exact wording shown at the moment they agreed, with a timestamp. Change the wording later and existing consents keep the text those people actually saw, which is what makes the record worth anything. See marketing.
What stops somebody joining
The page checks whether joining is possible before drawing the form, so a customer gets a clear explanation rather than a form that fails when they submit it. Every check runs again on submit, so nothing slips through a stale page.
Checks made before the form is shown
- The waitlist is switched off for that location.
- You are closed — outside the waitlist hours you have set.
- The waitlist is full — you have capped how many people can be in line at once.
Checks made when they submit
These need something only the visitor can supply, so they cannot run earlier:
- How far away they are, where you require people to be near the shop before joining.
- Whether you know them, where you only accept existing customers.
- Whether they are already in line, where you allow one live registration per person.
All of these are configured under waitlist rules.
Closed hours are a common surprise
A brand-new location has no hours set, which means people can join at three in the morning. Once you set hours, the waitlist genuinely closes — so if customers report the page saying you are closed when you are not, check the hours and the branch's time zone first.
What happens the moment they join
- A customer record is found or created from the number they gave.
- They are placed at the back of the queue.
- They are taken straight to their status page, showing their position and an estimated wait.
- They appear on your team's waitlist immediately — the count updates without anybody refreshing.
- If you have it switched on, a confirmation message goes out with a link back to that status page.