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.
#3 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.
#4 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.
#5 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.
#6 Geo-dependency
Attitude to online sports betting by country
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.
#7 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.
#8 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.
#9 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.
#10 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.
#11 Reporting and analysis
Interface visualization tools for 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.
#12 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.
#13 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.
#14 Mobility