How to Choose Sports Betting Software?

All sports betting software providers offer more or less the same product: similar functions, similar design, and almost the same set of bets and contests. So why do the decisions of some suppliers like players, and the decisions of others cause rejection? It's simple: the first rely on the positive user experience of the players, the second just want to earn on them. From our article you will learn how to select the first from the second.

Required software elements for sports betting

A software product can be good, bad and terrible. Terrible software is not just inconvenient and of poor quality, it is not able to meet the needs of the user - it simply does not have the necessary functions. And if you need to choose software for sports betting, you first need to make sure that it has the functionality you need and your users.

Here are some mandatory, according to the players, features of the betting software:

• a large number of sports leagues and rates;


• the ability to bet before, during and after matches;


• simple methods of payment and activation of services;


• multi-language support;


• security and anonymity;


• 24 × 7 customer support.

On the other hand, you need a sports betting platform that will satisfy your needs as its owner. It's about business management tools, risk, and the platform itself.

Here are some of these features:

• several options for depositing and withdrawing funds;


• administrative panel with plenty opportunities;


• a panel for managing marketing tools;


• detailed reporting on all aspects of the activity;


• ability to control bet limits;


• multi-language support.

Use the above criteria for the initial screening of available options. You should not bet on the needs of players only or bookmakers only. The market is full of solutions that can satisfy the needs of both parties. When the list is reduced to the sane amount, thoroughly examine the remaining options, focusing on the following 15 criteria.

15 criteria for quality sports betting software

Developer Reputation

Sports betting people are very sensitive to the safety and reliability of a bookmaker. Therefore, choosing a software vendor, you must first check its reputation.

You need to look at such things:

• Company Registration. Very often, software developers are registered offshore (hiding owners / beneficiaries). This helps to reduce fiscal payments, as well as helps to avoid liability in case of dissatisfaction of users or law enforcement officers of a particular country. For you, as a customer, registering a supplier in an offshore is not very profitable, therefore, other things being equal, you need to choose a company with registration in the USA, Great Britain, the European Union, Australia, Singapore, Japan or South Korea.


• License for bookmaker services. It is important that customers of the sports betting software provider obtain broker licenses, for example, in Germany, the USA, the UK or other countries where the state strictly monitors the integrity of gambling. This will make it clear that the software solution is safe and secure.


• Lack of scandals. If the software provider regularly gets into the news bulletins due to problems with its product, it is better to choose another option. Yes, it is possible that this is the machinations of competitors, but it is better not to risk.


• Recommendations. Look for reviews and recommendations from major brands that monitor their reputation. These can be official statements, interviews with top officials of the company and posts in social networks.
  Checking the company's reputation, remember that the absence of a negative reputation is more important than having a positive one. In other words, if there is a choice between a supplier without a reputation and a supplier with an ambiguous reputation (many positive and negative reviews), then you should choose the first company.

A variety of sports

The first thing you pay attention to when going to the site of a sports broker is a huge amount of sports. Each species is represented by a variety of leagues or tournaments with hundreds (if not thousands) of available events. For example, choosing basketball, you will see the American, European, Japanese and other leagues. If you choose European football, you will see hundreds of national leagues and dozens of international tournaments.

The best sites offer a choice of main areas (30-50 most popular sports), along with more niche ones. This ensures that the site will attract the widest audience, and not just fans of football, basketball, boxing and equestrian sports.

What directions should be supported by software for sports betting:

• Sports. Bets on traditional sport. Most users bet on football, American football, tennis, baseball, golf, horse racing, cricket, rugby, darts and ice hockey. The popularity of bets depends on the popularity of the sport.


• eSports. One of the newest trends in online betting, the main fans of which are video game lovers. Sports disciplines are the most popular games where you can conduct session matches. Now the main e-sports games are League of Legends, Dota 2, Counter-Strike, StarCraft II, Halo and Overwatch. Some of these competitions offer quite impressive prizes, for example, the winners of the TI8 tournament on Dota 2 in 2018 won $ 11 million (for five).


• Fantasy Sports. People collect their own "fantasy" teams from real players and, based on their achievements in real sport, decide which team is cooler (on points). There are leagues, tournaments and even fans. Prize funds are estimated in tens of millions of dollars. In the USA every sixth person is keen on this. In other regions, fantasy sports are not very popular yet, but the dynamics are positive.


• Live Betting. Bets on a game, race, match, race or other sporting event that is happening at the moment - no matter how long it began and how far it went. The best betting sites broadcast events in real time and give users the opportunity to make bets here.


• Virtual Sports. Bets on virtual games generated based on real game statistics and real player characteristics using the Random Number Generator (RNG), which makes the result pseudo-random. Usually it is football, baseball, hockey and horse racing. Virtual games are not held in real time, but are cheated in advance. In this case, the players are shown a short video (3D-graphics) for about 30 seconds and the final results.

Scalability

As the owner of a sports betting site, you must choose a solution which performance will increase with the increasing popularity of your site. And it should not be a paid feature, but something that is inherent in the default software.

At the same time, software should increase its performance very quickly: one to two hours. Each bookmaker office knows that there is nothing worse than a software crash when the national football league teams came out on Sunday. This is a huge monetary and reputational losses.

Individual design

Sports betting software must support the ability to change the user interface design. Such a setting should affect not only the change of several templates, themes and color variations, but the possibility of creating a truly unique web design. This is usually implemented in one of two ways:

• The software has built-in tools for the broadest design customization. Working with him should be so simple that it does not require hiring an agency or a team of web designers.


• The software vendor creates the design that the customer needs.
  Both options are good, but provided that the development of custom design is included in the price of the software, and is not a service for extra money.

Partnership programs

Usually we are talking about affiliate programs online casinos or sites that sell sports predictions. In both cases, as a rule, they pay for registration, deposit replenishment or payment for services (CPA-model). Less commonly used is the RevShare model, where they pay a percentage of the profits from each attracted user.

If the referral is lucky and wins, the balance will be in the red. And this minus will go from month to month, until the referral loses more than won, and brings profit to the donor service.

Such affiliate programs should be initially integrated into the software for sports betting along with management tools, configuration and reporting for each referral. It is also important that the supplier does not impose its partners, but gives the opportunity to choose an affiliate program at your discretion.

Geo-dependency

When a user visits the site, the system should determine his location and preferred language. It will help to:

• select the desired interface language and time zone;


• block users from countries where online sports betting is prohibited;


• select popular sports in the region, leagues and tournaments;


• select payment instruments available in the region of the user;


• find the right advertising.

Neural networks

In the past few years, a real revolution has occurred in the field of artificial intelligence programming due to the development of deep neural networks. With their help, you can create software for:

• Risk management. Tracking the pattern of bets, finding strange actions of players, preventing and protecting against DDoS attacks, preventing fraud, tracking cheaters and the like.


• Marketing management. AB testing, collecting marketing data, analyzing player behavior, creating promotional offers and predicting reaction to them.


• Technical Support Management. Feedback from users, search for failures and identification of their causes.

Marketing tools

Online sports betting software should have direct integration with:

• InfoBip, Twilio, OnVerify for SMS marketing;


• Instagram, Facebook, Twitter for promotion in social networks;


• GetResponse, MailChimp, Aweber, ConstantContact for email marketing;


• SugarCRM and VTiger for customer relationship management;


• AWS kinesis for real-time data analysis;


• Google Analytics and Clicky for traffic analysis.

Ease of use

To be aware of all the games, rates and spreads along with hundreds of smaller details is very difficult. However, this is vital for any bookmaker, because without universal control, you can quickly go bankrupt or lose a competitive advantage, having missed an important trend. Therefore, bookmakers appreciate not only the versatility and quality, but also the simplicity of the software.

Security and Privacy

Your website will deal with large amounts of money and confidential user data, so software for online sports betting should have several levels of protection against unauthorized entry and data theft. And this concerns not only the protection of information stored on the servers of your project, but also the encryption of traffic that goes from you to users and back.

This can be done using cryptography (with private and public keys) and / or blockchain. The distribution register and smart contracts are currently the most reliable tools for sharing value online and ensuring the privacy of parties. It is not necessary to create a blockchain from scratch, you can use existing platforms that are sharpened by online betting.

Reporting and analysis

In order for you and the site management to get an idea of the activity of the players, the profitability of the project (directions, sports, rates), marketing effectiveness and so on, the software for sports betting must have an expanded reporting system. Information should be presented in the form of tables, lists, graphs and charts.

The more statistics, the better. Of course, provided that there are tools for analyzing, predicting and searching for correlations. Correlation is a statistical dependence of two or more quantities, factors, functions. Correlation tools are needed to find unobvious connections that can optimize business processes.

Localization

Sports betting is popular in all countries, and it doesn’t matter to players what registration is with the site that provides this service. The main thing is that the interface is in plain language and the site allows you to bet on local leagues, tournaments, teams.

To localize the site, the software must support work with UTF-8 and systems that determine the user's location and preferred interface language. You can use Google Trends to determine which sports, tournaments, teams, and athletes are popular in a particular country.

Multiplatform

Software should work with all platforms and devices. It is now quite simple to do this by creating a website whose user interface adapts to any size of user screens. Such an adaptation should be pre-configured in a certain way, so that the screen can always see the necessary interface elements, and not one continuous advertisement.

Mobility

Most owners of smartphones and tablets prefer to use specialized applications, rather than web interfaces. They work faster, more comfortable and, as a rule, have a more pleasant design. In other words, even if your site is able to adapt to any screen sizes, you cannot do without a mobile application.

Consequently, betting software must either already have several templates for creating such an application, or be able to integrate with them through an API. If there are templates, development will be easier and cheaper, but there will be problems with uniqueness. Developing an application such as William Hill from scratch will take more time and will cost from 15 to 30 thousand dollars.

Support

Customer support for sports betting software should cover three key areas:

• Licensing. Assistance with the purchase of software and obtaining a license for bookmaker activity in the right jurisdiction. The latter is especially important because the developer knows better the peculiarities of his product and whether he passes according to the licensing regulations in the chosen country. In addition, if this is not a new company, then its software probably has already undergone a similar procedure, therefore, there are developments in optimizing this process.


• Customer support. Frequently asked questions, troubleshooting, and debugging. With all this, the developer should help his clients, for which a support service is needed. In addition to it, there should be video guides on acquaintance with the product and its configuration, as well as text descriptions of troubleshooting typical problems.


• Updates. There are two types: bug fixes - eliminate software code errors, upgrades - expand or improve functionality. Upgrades occur every six months or a year, bug fixes every few months or immediately after the upgrade. If the software for rates has not been updated for a long time (more than a year), it is better not to use it. Too frequent updates - a reason to think about the professionalism of developers: "What kind of developer, whose product requires constant updates?".

After studying these criteria, proceed to development. The Merehead team has prepared for you a list of 7 steps to help you build your sports betting platform. They include internal and external development, payment integration, and security.

Seven steps to build your sports betting platform

Define your goals and audience

Before you build your sports betting platform, define your goals and audience. Decide what features and functionality you want to include, such as:

• in-app payment


• real-time betting


• user profiles

Make a portrait of your audience. Specify parameters such as gender, age, occupation, and income. Think about what your platform should look like to attract users' attention.

Research legal and regulatory requirements

Sports betting is governed by various regulations that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Research and comply with the laws and acts in your country of incorporation.




Parameters for choosing a jurisdiction to establish a sports betting platform:

• Licensing conditions. Background checks, technical standards, and responsible gambling measures.


• Types of authorized bets. Traditional sports betting, in-play betting, and virtual sports.


• Taxation. License fees as well as taxes on income.


• Anti-Money Laundering. Explore AML regulations such as customer due diligence, suspicious transaction reporting, and record-keeping requirements.

Malta, Gibraltar, Curacao, and the Isle of Man are the most attractive jurisdictions for setting up a sports betting platform. Do your research and consider the parameters above before choosing the right one.

Build a reliable Back-end infrastructure

A sports betting platform needs a reliable and scalable infrastructure. It should perform the following functions:

• Providing user authentication


• Data storage and computation


• real-time updates


• Integration with third-party services, such as payment gateways

Two options for creating BackEnd infrastructure are outsourcing or an in-house development team.


The first option provides a better deal because you work with niche specialists. Finding and building an in-house development department takes time and effort.

Design the user interface

Create a user interface that is intuitive and visually appealing. Think navigation, registration and login, transparent display of odds and markets, and the betting process.




According to GoodFirms, 38.5% of users leave a website because of outdated design. Use the best color combinations and schemes for websites to keep visitors' attention and encourage them to interact with the platform.

Ensure secure user authentication

Use robust security measures, such as encryption protocols or two-factor authentication, to protect data and transactions. Partner only with trusted payment portals and gateways to ensure quality transaction fulfillment.

Enable withdrawals and payments

Integrate payment methods like credit/debit cards, e-wallets, and bank transfers. Also, the trend of blockchain payments is gaining popularity among sports betting platforms. Develop a cryptocurrency gateway for transactions in USDT, ETH, BTC, or TRX.