We live in an age when more and more people are taking the plunge and starting their own businesses rather than work for someone else. Some of these businesses may be small independent retailers on the high street, but many are internet businesses which require far less capital investment and have much lower operating costs particularly if they can be run from the owner’s home. There are however a number of factors which are common to almost every new or indeed any existing enterprise, one of which is the need for a realistic business plan. Even if a new business does not require external investment, a well thought out business plan is vital to its success. The first thing almost every business needs to do is identify who their customers are likely to be, and having done that they then need to decide how they are going to communicate with those potential customers and persuade them to do business with them. Advertising and other marketing techniques are of course the common tools used to attract potential customers in almost every business sector, as of course is aggressive pricing in some sectors. The big supermarkets for instance regularly spark a price war for products such as fuel from their service stations, and some companies seem to be promoting sales all year round as part of their marketing strategy, but that sort of price war is not possible in some areas. Here at onlinecasino.ie we are of course primarily interested in how the online gambling site operators attract our attention and try to persuade us to use their site instead of one of their rivals. Neither an online sports gambling site nor an online casino site can use reduced prices as a marketing tool, because the customer is the one who decides how much they want to spend. That is why the most common approach used by almost every online casino and online sports gambling site is some sort of bonus offer or loyalty reward. The problem is that whilst most bonus offers advertised by the online sports gambling site operators such as Paddy Power are straightforward and easily understood, the common online casino bonus offers are not always so clear and can easily be misunderstood. A free bet at Paddy Power for example is exactly what it says, as is a promise of cash back if your horse comes in second. There are no complicated terms and conditions associated with that type of bonus offer, but most online casino bonus deals do have a number of terms and conditions which need to be fully understood before agreeing to accept a bonus.
Almost every online casino bonus takes the form of a promise to match a new casino games player’s first deposit with a 100% bonus. Some online casinos go even further and offer a reduced bonus on the second and even the third deposits, but all of these welcome bonuses come with a number of conditions the most important of which is the play through requirement. If the online casino operators are going to allow new customers to play casino games using their money, which is what these matching bonuses do then they clearly want those new customers to play on their site for as long as possible. This is why they stipulate how much money a new customer needs to stake on playing their casino games in order to qualify for their welcome bonus. This is what we call the play through requirement and it is usually defined as a multiple of the total of the initial deposit plus the bonus, and that multiple is generally a factor of twenty at most online casino sites. To put that into plain language, if a player decides to make an initial deposit of say 25 euros the welcome bonus would add a further 25 euros to his or her stake money making 50 euros in total. If the play through multiple was twenty then that player would need to stake 1000 euros on playing casino games as a condition of receiving the bonus. Clearly an offer to double our initial stake money is on the face of it a very generous deal, but not everybody has the budget or even wants to play casino games for that sort of money. There may also be a time limit on the play through conditions and even some casino games which do not fully qualify because they are considered to have a lower house edge. All these terms and conditions are perfectly logical and understandable from the perspective of the online casino operator, but any new casino games player considering accepting one of these welcome bonuses must understand what is expected of them before agreeing. Remember that all these online casino bonus offers are voluntary and whether you accept or not will have no effect on your future relationship with the online casino.
Not every online casino offers this sort of welcome bonus however. The Free Spins casino for instance chooses to allow customers to take advantage of free spins on their slots games rather than offering a bonus. Another online casino which does not offer this sort of online casino bonus is the aptly named No Bonus casino. In this case they have chosen to reward both new and existing customers with an unusual cash-back offer. If one of their customers makes a deposit today and goes on to have a terrible run of luck when playing their casino games and loses the whole of that deposit on the same day, they will receive a 10% cash-back paid into their account the following morning. There are no strings attached and they can either use that money to continue to play casino games or they can choose to withdraw it. There are no penalties or charges incurred if that is what they choose to do. Although we have used this article to explain the potential drawbacks of the matching bonus offers found at many of our online casinos, we also know that it is a good deal for many people provided they understand the terms.