Getting started
Fifteen minutes to a working drop, most of it waiting for you to decide a start time.
1. Turn the app embed on
This is the step people miss, and nothing works without it.
Installing WaitRoom does not, by itself, put anything on your storefront. Shopify requires you to enable the app's theme embed:
- Online Store → Themes → Customize
- Open App embeds in the left sidebar
- Turn on WaitRoom
- Save
Without this, your drop will run perfectly in the admin and shoppers will never see a waiting room. If you're not sure whether it's on, see Troubleshooting.
2. Create a drop
Drops → Create drop.
The settings that matter on your first one:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Products | What the drop covers. Pick them by hand, or Use a collection to pull in everything in one. |
| Start / end time | In your store's timezone. The drop opens by itself at the start time. |
| Queue mode | FIFO is first-come-first-served. Random draws a raffle. Priority gives returning customers a head start. |
| Max per customer | Enforced at checkout, across separate orders — not just per basket. |
| Batch size / interval | How many people are released at a time, and how often. |
| Pass validity | How long a released shopper has to check out before their place is given up. |
| Open the waiting room early | Lets people queue before the drop opens. Strongly recommended — see below. |
About "open the waiting room early"
Leave it blank and joins are refused until the start time, which means everyone refreshes at 10:00:00 and the fastest connection wins.
Set it to, say, 30 and people can enter from 09:30. Everyone who arrives
before the doors open is put in a random order at the start time — so arriving
early beats arriving late, but refreshing beats nothing. That's the point.
Skip-the-queue access codes still work throughout. Loyalty priority does not apply to early arrivals; the app tells you this when you set it.
3. Decide where the queue appears
By default a drop intercepts shoppers on the product pages it covers. That's often all you need.
If you want more than that — the whole storefront, a collection page, a landing page — open Queue triggers on the drop. See How it works, because the distinction catches people out.
4. Run it
The drop opens by itself at its start time. While it's live, the drop page shows the queue size, how many have been released, and what's been bought.
You can pause it (which un-gates the products so people can buy normally), end it, or — if you paused to postpone — put it back to scheduled with a new start time.
5. Check it actually worked
After your first drop, look at:
- Orders — did the limits hold?
- The drop's analytics — queue size, released, purchased
- Your logs, if something looked wrong
Before a real drop
Two things worth doing once, on a quiet day:
Run a test drop end to end. Set a start time five minutes out, join from a private window, and buy something. Most problems show up here rather than in any setting.
Check your plan's queue ceiling. If more people turn up than your plan allows, you're told and asked to upgrade — the queue keeps working, but it's better to know beforehand. See the pricing page for the limits.