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.

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.
Online joining is paused for the rest of the day — somebody chose to stop joining when they cleared the waitlist, or paused it from the unusual activity banner. The page says “The waitlist has closed for today”, and it reopens by itself at midnight, or sooner if somebody presses Reopen joining on the waitlist.
The account can’t take visitors — Queue Join support has suspended it, the location is beyond what your plan covers, or this month’s visits are used up. The page says “This business isn’t taking visitors online at the moment.”

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.

These are configured under waitlist rules.

Protection from misuse

Nobody has to prove the number they type is theirs, so Queue Join also checks the number itself on submit. It turns the join away when:

the number is premium-rate, freephone or otherwise not a mobile;
it is from a country the location doesn’t take numbers from;
you, or Queue Join, have blocked it;
it has joined this location several times today, or joined many different businesses today;
a lot of attempts are coming from one connection.

The visitor sees “We couldn’t add you to the waitlist online. Please speak to a member of staff.” — the same words whichever rule caught them, so nobody can work out how to get round it. You can still add them by hand, unless the number is blocked.

Occasionally the form shows a security check (Cloudflare Turnstile) before it accepts the join: when one connection is making a lot of attempts, or when the location is seeing unusual activity. Nearly everybody else never sees it.

Someone already in line who scans your code again is simply shown their place, and your own test numbers get far higher limits. See blocked and test numbers.

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.

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