The platform you choose will be the foundation for all of your future decisions, including participant experience and payment options. A good choice means the platform will support your growth. A bad choice means you will fight against your own infrastructure and discover problems years down the line, especially since changing platforms will be a difficult and costly choice.
The industry has a tendency to get this decision wrong in the same few ways. If you have to pick between either a full online casino software provider or a ready-to-use iGaming website builder, avoiding these five errors will save you money and time in addition to avoiding the frustration of working with the first five options you evaluate.
Mistake 1: Choosing on Price Alone
The first error is picking something based on cost. The option with the lowest cost is almost never the best choice. As a new operator, knowing that you have to manage your budget may lead you to pick your software based on cost. Unfortunately, the options you pay the least for may not have the best terms. Options with low upfront costs may include high costs to your revenue, add-on features that come with a high cost, or payment inflexible features.
Total cost of ownership in the first few years trumps first-day pricing. Platforms costing more on day one but including payments, game content, and back-office tools are more cost-effective than “budget” platforms requiring constant additions. More importantly, “budget” platforms are inexpensive for a reason. When evaluating cost, consider more than the price displayed and analyze what additional costs you will incur to sustain the platform at scale.
You should place the most value on revenue-share agreements. While they may appear to have a great value for your small operation, they may become your largest expense as your operation grows. You need to plan for the scale you intend to operate at, not the scale you plan to start at. The more appropriate question is not “how cheap can we be to start operations?” but “which platform will allow the business to be most profitable for the longest term?”
Mistake 2: Overlooking the Payment Infrastructure
As an operator, it is easy to become consumed with your game library and UI, while considering payments an afterthought. Payments should be the focus, as this is how you acquire and retain your customers. No matter how alluring your platform may be, players will not stick around if they can’t make a deposit, or if they have to wait to receive their money.
Examine a platform’s payment options closely. Do they account for local payment options popular among your target audience such as local bank transfers, e-wallets, mobile payments, etc., or just international credit cards? Are your options diversified beyond a single payment gateway? Would service interruptions experienced by your payment gateway disrupt the inflow of revenue? Would automated deposits and low-risk payment processing eliminate the need for bottlenecks in withdrawing payment? Despite having an efficient payment system, a platform with a poor payment network will prevent optimal conversion and retention. The gap of payment options must be prioritized.
Mistake 3: Ignoring Scalability and Support
A platform may seem able to support your needs during a trial with a limited number of users. What will happen once you have thousands of users making simultaneous transactions during a large promotion or a major sporting event? Operators that do not focus on Scalability usually launch with a great deal of enthusiasm, then experience a significant decline in growth and poor transactional performance at a time that their customers should be the most satisfied and excited.
Support is the other essential aspect. If something fails at 2 a.m. on a weekend, the quality of technical support available will determine how much you lose in income and how much client/consumer trust you will lose. Demand answers on the guarantee of uptime, response times, and details on the support you will receive before signing the contract. A platform is just good as the ability it has to support you when it goes down. In this industry, one of the most common and avoidable mistakes is outgrowing a service and solution you should have seen.
You must also ask how complex the platform can get. Complexity can come in the form of more games, more payment methods, more markets, and more players across all time zones. A smooth and easy to manage system at launch can quickly become sluggish once you try to integrate the full ecosystem. A platform that has been built to easily and regularly expand is great; a delicate one will treat every new addition as a project. Request existing operators to describe how the platform they have been using has coped with their business growth. Their personal account will be much longer and more useful than any benchmark advertising the solution.
Mistake 4: Underestimating Customization and Lock-In
This mistake works in both directions. Some operators choose a software solution so flexible that their casino looks and feels identical to every other casino using that solution. This means that operators have no way to develop their brand, design their player journey, or choose features that would help them differentiate their casino. In a competitive landscape, that level of uniformity is guaranteed to be fatal.
On the opposite side of the spectrum is a complete lack of understanding about the extent of the flexibility the operators are signing up for, namely: who gets custody of the player data, how easy it will be to migrate to another solution provider, and the level of control the operators will have over the front-end and their roadmap. The optimal solution for the remaining friction that exists in the iGaming space is the ability to fully brand the solution in a way that is differentiated, while the provider retains control and responsibility of the underlying solution and the streams for its ongoing support and maintenance.
Mistake 5: Skipping Due Diligence on Track Record and Compliance
Failing to vet a provider’s track record in their regulatory compliance is a critical error. When operators do not bother to ascertain the real track record of a provider, they have become irrevocably tied to a provider that is unreliable and incapable of delivering the so-called “best in class” features that will help the operators achieve a compliant “go live”.
Conduct proper research. Examine a provider’s history and the duration of their service, seek feedback and reviews from actual users, and establish the provider’s security and certification standards. Furthermore, consider their compliance protocols. A serious online casino software provider will assist with the licensing and implementation of KYC and AML practices and will integrate responsible gambling features. With the current regulatory environment, these features and services must be offered as a standard. When evaluating a provider, their reputation and reliability are as important as the features they provide. Spending a few extra days to thoroughly conduct research and due diligence is of far greater value than the costs of selecting the wrong partner after a system has been launched.
How to Avoid All Five
When evaluating these five mistakes, the common thread among them is that they all stem from a very narrow evaluation of the system. This includes evaluating price with total costs, features with integration of payment, a demo with a system that is scalable, a launch with control, and a pitch with proof. Those who select the best providers have the widest view, evaluating the complete picture, including cost, payment, scalability, support, flexibility, and reliability.
The best approach is the easiest. Develop a scoring system to cover these six areas and evaluate all candidates using this system. This is much more important than individual features that stand out. Whenever you have the option, select a provider that has a system which integrates payment, gaming, back-office, and compliance into a single, comprehensive support system. This ensures that a provider is not integrating multiple, independent, and highly specialized systems.
Before making a full commitment to any business software, it is wise to test out a small trial. The final few candidates that you have selected should be asked to show you business relevant scenarios such as a local deposit, a quick withdrawal, a bonus set up, or a reporting export. Create your own scenarios, and consider their response to your questions. This will demonstrate far more than their sales pitch.
Final Thoughts
Aspects of your business that you may later come to regret can not be altered without incurring a cost. With that in mind, consider the integrity of your payment system and the long-term scalability of system, combined with your ability to make further changes to the system in the future, and your ability to leave the system. Always check the background and practices of the providers. Those that implement these considerations will have a platform with which to grow their business. Those that do not will spend their first business year fighting the platform that is meant to support their business.
If you have multiple options for a solution, choose the one purpose built to solve all five issues simultaneously. TT Wonders is such an example. Their platform is a the fully customizable white-label solution that integrates thousands of games and a complete payment solution.