When you sign up for a betting website you will have to add funds in order to be able to place bets. Initially these funds will appear in your main account, but with some companies you will need to transfer money between what are referred to as ‘wallets’ if you wish to use different products and services. The best example of this is a site that offers both sportsbook betting and a casino.
You might wish to place some bets on a football match, then head over and play some roulette or three-card poker in the casino. A single wallet site will let you do this immediately, whilst a multi-wallet business will require you to transfer money from your sportsbook account into the casino (bingo, poker, etc.). It’s not a complicated process, but it can be an off-putting one to some.
Why Multi-Wallets Exist
It might seem relatively simple to look at the world of betting and feel as though a single wallet approach is one that makes the most sense. After all, you want to make life as convenient as possible for the people who use your services, so asking them to transfer money between various accounts seems to go against that particular approach.
Whilst that’s almost certainly true, the reality is that the explosion in products offered to online bettors at the early part of the 21st century meant that gambling sites didn’t necessarily have the ability to have one account for all services that they offered. It wasn’t the smoothest of journeys for players wishing to take advantage of a host of different products.
From a customer’s point of view, they were betting with the same company but just using different services. For the betting sites, however, it was much more complex behind-the-scenes. The games and offerings were brought in from numerous different suppliers, meaning that it was more complex than simply paying from one location.
This is where the multi-wallet experience came from. It was less than convenient for customers but a necessity for the companies offering their services online. Customers didn’t have to leave the site that they were betting on, but they did have to request for their funds to be shifted from one section of the site to another before they were able to bet.
The Move To A Single Wallet
This lack of convenience for the customer was always likely to cause problems. If a bettor enjoyed using numerous different products, their time would be taken up moving money from one wallet to another. In a fast-moving world, that was time that customers could ill afford and some didn’t enjoy it. Betting companies soon began to look for a way to unite the wallets.
At the very least, companies wanted to make the user experience an easier one for punters hoping to use everything from sportsbook to bingo via casino and poker services on one site. By doing so, it was hoped that the cross-sell of all of these products would be an easier one to manage. If a customer doesn’t need to mess around moving money, they might just ‘try’ something.
If something is good for the customer then it will very quickly become good for the business offering it, so a big push to create and use single wallets for online operators followed. A customer who loved poker and barely ever placed a sportsbook bet because they couldn’t be bothered to move funds between accounts could suddenly to the latter on a whim.
Is There An Advantage To One Over The Other?
Reading all of that, one could be forgiven for thinking that a single wallet was the only way to go for an online operator. After all, it puts all of a customer’s funds in one place, allows them to bet on what they want when they want to do so and provides a solid sense of convenience for anyone that likes to do their wagering online.
However, there is certainly an argument that a multi-wallet system has its advantages. It’s for that reason that plenty of operators still use multi-wallets rather than converting everything to a single wallet. This includes some of the big operators in the market, who will have made the decision to stick with multi-wallets after huge amounts of research into the issue.
The first thing to think about is the fact that some people like to know how much they’re betting on individual specialities. A bettor who likes to keep track of their wins and their losses will be keen to keep all of their money separate. Knowing that they’re consistently down on casino bets but regularly up on sportsbook ones can lead them to reassess their betting habits, for example.
There’s also the fact that we live in an age when regulators and operators are keen to ensure that the most vulnerable are protected and that problem gamblers are helped. Whilst the back-end will provide enough information to betting companies to know if someone seems to be displaying symptoms of being a problem gambler, it is harder for them to know themselves if all funds are in one place.
If, on the other hand, they have to move funds from one part of the site to another there is an increased chance that they will notice that they’ve been spending a lot of money in one area. This will then give them the opportunity to seek help with a problem that they didn’t know that they had. Even the smallest such thing could help someone who needs such assistance.
Ultimately, of course, it comes down to user preference. It is unquestionably easier to pay for whichever product you wish to use from the same wallet, but some people will prefer organisation over convenience. The question comes down to whether the type of wallet used by a site would be a deciding factor in a customer using it, which it most likely wouldn’t be in most cases.