Young business people know that an online casino isn’t only a place to gamble and relax. It’s also a prospective startup-like option for money-earning. In 2021, there is no need to buy or build an expensive hotel in Las Vegas or Macau to start a gambling business. Thus, the owner of Pokie Mate Casino spent about $30,000 to deliver a worthy product to the Australian market, while Casumo — about $50,000.
At the same time, having cash, ideas, and passion is insufficient. You have to deepen into the diverse fields related to an online casino launch:
- game providers specifics (which one to choose and how)
- casino games selection (content diversity is important)
- juridical aspects (licensing, local laws and restrictions)
- software development (including UX/UI, data storage, and safety)
- payment options (how to get more variants and why)
- marketing (difficulties and differences for particular geo, promotion steps)
Let’s go step by step with our 6-stages guide to know more details on starting an online casino with a low budget.
How to Choose a Reliable Provider?
There is no need to create every game from scratch if you want to build a casino site. This niche is huge enough to find joyful activity with needed RTP rates and valuable prices. There are dozens of reliable game providers at the moment, and new studios are likely to open, making the competition fierce.
Game developers usually sell games for a fixed amount of money and take extra fees from the turnover. You can buy one game or bulk, with the second variant being cheaper per game. Pay attention to the games’ quality and variety and ask how long the integration process takes.
The most reliable studios are years on the market and well known in the niche, but the situation changes. At the moment, you can rely on:
Choice of Jurisdiction and License
There are five types of digital gambling regulation by countries’ governments:
- Government forbids online gambling (Poland, the UAE).
- Government owns the gambling sector themselves, having a monopoly (Finland, Norway).
- Government delegates regulation to the states and territories (the US).
- Government regulates and gives licenses to gambling sites themselves (the UK, the Netherlands).
- Government allows offshore licenses for digital gambling venues (Canada, New Zealand).
Getting a license or state approval is the process that requires the following steps:
- Register a firm and office in the country.
- Provide a licensing commission with the complete data package about the director.
- Open a bank account with a frozen amount of money to guarantee withdrawals.
- Present software and hardware for checking to exclude scamming and cheating with RTPs.
- Wait a few months, so the licensing body verifies all the elements above.
That is a short step-by-step guide on what to expect from the legal point of view. You must understand every little detail before starting an online casino site.
Content Filling
This step relates to the first one, where game providers are the core of success. But, this element also includes an understanding of marketing and strategy. For instance, you declare your gambling website as a place with live dealers only. So, your table games like roulette, craps, poker, or blackjack should mean live presence. You have to choose the games with the best design and lowest traffic load to exclude lags on the clients’ side. At the same time, there is no need to buy bulk offers of the table games as it will go contrary to your main idea.
The recent trend in online casinos is the presence of hundreds of games, especially slots. A few years ago, two/three hundred games and slots was a great variety at a casino site. Now, even a budget site Pokie Mate Casino offers 700+ games. They don’t cooperate with too many providers, which gives great room for further improvement.
Casino games overgrew into a separate cluster in development and marketing. This vector turned to storytelling, where history and culture play a critical role. Casino content should meet the geo preferences of the chosen region. Anime-like slots aren’t effective for the non-Japan market or winter-stylised games in Australia.
Creation of the Perfect UX / UI Design
User Experience & Interface are the brothers that impact the first impression. While the design is too subjective to discuss, the technical background is vital. A client should know from the very first seconds what button to push to find a needed game. Mobile optimisation and speed of pages’ opening are invisible but vital.
The size and colour of the buttons have become a separate science nowadays. Designers do serious research in this field to know which variant is the most suitable for usage. A menu shouldn’t be too complex and overloaded with unneeded tabs and info. The right step in this direction is to consult at least, and Dasao Lume’s blog can help.
Connection of Payment Gateways
To start an online casino, you have to dive into the financial pool as well. Yet, signing bills and balancing debit and credit in the ledger isn’t the only activity. Adding as many payment options as possible is a task of higher priority. There are three main ways of how a customer can deposit and withdraw money from a gambling site:
- banking options (Visa & Mastercard debit and credit cards)
- e-wallets (PayPal, Neteller, Skrill, ecoPayz, etc.)
- cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, Ripple, Litecoin)
Of course, adding every payment gateway costs extra money, but it opens your casino to a wider audience. If your gambling site focuses on a particular location, you should add local payment options. It can be both specific banking variants or even e-wallets that dominate in the country. Also, you should realise immediate payments for every variant to increase retention.
Marketing and Promotion
Finally, we get to the element that would define the success of your online casino. One can make all the previous steps perfectly and get no clients. Understanding marketing should be the key to starting this business. Knowing where the competitiveness is lower (or promotion is cheaper) saves money.
There are five main types for casino site promotion:
- Ambassador (take a popular person to attract attention, use them in ads).
- Bonuses (welcome bonus always looks attractive, but also use cashback, rebate, loyalty programs).
- Affiliate marketing (delegate advertising to other persons or firms and share profits).
- Apps’ ads (free mobile games are a cheap but effective way to bring clients).
- SEO (that is a cheap but long-run strategy not to ignore as it supports the brand over the internet).
Creating a casino site is a complicated process that requires diverse knowledge. Yet, there is nothing impossible if to combine expertise and passion.
