Price comparison websites (PCWs) have become extremely popular in recent years.
The growth of the intermediaries market can be explained by consumer demand for:
- Saving time when searching for products or services from different online shops and suppliers.
- Being confident that they will get the best deal.
Price comparison websites have become increasingly important to online retailers as well, namely because:
- Up to 20% of retailers’ website traffic in many industries is from PCWs.
- 94% of online shoppers invest time in finding the best price when making a purchase.
- This sector is growing 2x faster than overall commerce.
- The significant increase in CSE transactions from mobile devices (67% in 6 months).
The same tendency can be observed in the sports betting market. Bookmakers acquire quality traffic, increase their brand awareness, and gain customer loyalty after listing on odds comparison websites. Punters are guaranteed to win more money by comparing the betting odds from multiple bookmakers. However, choosing a reliable and trusted odds comparison website is the most important step.
According to the research among punters who already use odds comparison websites, the most important things are:
- Immediate updates of the match pages and betting odds.
- Extra information besides the odds, such as standings and statistics.
- An easily navigable interface.
When our clients came to us with a request to design and develop an odds comparison website for Georgia, we considered the above facts.
We explored well-known comparison websites, such as oddschecker.com, oddsportal, odds-comparison.co.uk, www.bestbetting, and www.betbrain.com, and discovered that the average speed of data updates is 6-7 seconds. We decided to improve that rate, and while it was not a simple task, we eventually improved the rate by 3-5 seconds. The system was built using the high-performance, secure and professional PHP framework Yii2. We think it is the best choice for developing Web 2.0 applications, as it provides many key features, including MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, I18N/L10N, caching, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, testing, etc.
To ensure high performance on the front-end of the website, we used Angular js – the JavaScript framework maintained by Google. By using Ajax, the data on the pages updates without having to reload the whole page.
All the analog websites offer additional information that is valuable to the punters. However, it is not always easily accessible and users normally need to make 2-4 clicks to reach it. We projected the user flow in such a way that punters can quickly access their required standings, stats, favorite matches and teams.
One of the client’s requirements was to not overload the user interface with colors and flashing windows.
Our designer prepared several versions in different color schemes: green, blue, red and orange. Understanding color and the impact it has on our minds is essential for making marketing-smart color decisions.
We have chosen a light grey background, along with dark grey and black colors for navigation and orange as an accent color. Orange is a fun, dynamic color that tends to elicit strong reactions.
The odds comparison website is currently in the final testing phase and will be available online very soon. The marketing campaign has already begun.
