Ensure you fully understand the conditions of any online casino bonus offer

The one common feature of any retail business is that their success depends totally on what economists call consumer confidence. Unfortunately consumer confidence can be affected by many different things, and can change very quickly depending on the individual consumer’s personal circumstances or even the general feeling of wellbeing in their community or across the country. The secret of success for a retailer is therefore to try to help their customers feel good about themselves and appeal to their well-established love of shopping. Clearly we all have different requirements when we go shopping, but there are two common things which generally make most of us feel happy about a purchase, the first being quality and the second being price. When we get a good quality product or service most of us will enjoy that experience and feel better about ourselves, and if we also think we acquired that product or service for a good price that would be the icing on the cake. Quality and price are therefore the major weapons in any retailer’s armoury in the current competitive climate, particularly when it comes to the high street retailers competing with the internet. The question is can the same principles be applied to the gambling sector which also clearly relies on our feeling of wellbeing and economic confidence. Here at onlinecasino.ie we are obviously more interested in how the various online casino operators compete with each other rather than other areas of the gambling market, but some things do apply to almost every part of the sector. Quality is of course paramount for every business operating in the gambling sector, particularly when it comes to the financial management of an internet site dealing directly with the public, but what about price. Almost every online sports gambling site for example will be offering very similar if not identical odds on most of their featured sporting events, with perhaps one special deal advertised each week. Apart from free bets for new customers that is about the limit of their ability to compete with each other on price. A similar situation will also be found in the online casino sector of the gambling market, which generally tends to rely on online casino bonus offers as their main way to appeal to potential new customers. Once again we need to be sure of the quality of the financial and personal security aspects of any online casino site, but the online casino site operators do perhaps have more options with regard to the quality of their product, namely the casino games they feature on the site. We hope that our recommended list here at onlinecasino.ie will help our readers select an online casino site which satisfies all the quality aspects we have mentioned, so we should turn our attention to the online casino bonus deals offered by those online casinos. The first online casinos to come on stream were of course introduced by the leading bookmakers as part of their online sports gambling sites, and for various reasons all these sites appeared very similar to one another. There were of course fewer experienced casino software companies at the time, which limited the range of casino games those first online casinos could offer, so the site operators needed another way to appeal to potential new online casino games players. Unfortunately the online casino bonus deals these first online casinos chose to serve that purpose were also almost identical in format. Not only that but they were also somewhat complicated, with a number of terms and conditions leading to misunderstandings for some of their customers.

Almost all of these first online casino bonus offers took the form of a promise to match a new customer’s first cash deposit with a 100% bonus, thereby doubling the stake money available to play casino games. Many of these online casino bonus deals also awarded smaller bonuses on the second or even third deposits, but they all came with a list of terms and conditions. Before we go on to detail these terms and conditions, we should point out that this form of online casino bonus is still the most common form of welcome bonus available at our online casinos, and the terms and conditions can still cause problems and misunderstandings. The most important and most misunderstood of these conditions is what is commonly termed the play-through requirement. This condition defines how much money a player needs to stake on playing casino games in order to qualify for the bonus, and is usually expressed as a multiple of the sum of the deposit plus the bonus. For most online casinos which offer this type of online casino bonus that multiple will be at least 20 times the sum of the deposit plus the bonus. In plain English that means that if a player makes a deposit of say 25 euros and decides to accept a bonus offer of a further 25 euros making 50 euros in total, that player will be required to stake at least 1000 euros on playing casino games before being allowed to withdraw any money won as a result of accepting the bonus. If a new player is perfectly happy to gamble that sort of money on playing casino games, then this sort of bonus represents a pretty good deal. Unfortunately not everyone has that sort of budget they can afford to set aside to play casino games, so it is vital that they understand the commitment they are being asked to make as a condition of accepting the bonus.

Not every online casino on our recommended list offers this sort of online casino bonus, and in fact there is one aptly named the NoBonus casino which as the name suggests does not offer any welcome bonus preferring instead to offer an innovative cash-back deal for players having a run of bad luck. The Free Spins casino is another of the relatively new online casinos which has chosen another way to attract and reward new customers, again through a feature made obvious in the site name.