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// PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL // September/October 2016
I
t doesn’t matter whether you are selling
jeans, vehicles or lottery tickets, the great
challenge in today’s retail environment is
the same: to design and deliver a “friction-
less” experience in a world that is increas-
ingly dominated by the convenience of on-
line transactions.
How much of retail is now conducted
online? In PWC’s 2016 Total Retail re-
port—a survey of the retail buying prefer-
ences of more than 23,000 shoppers in 25
countries—it was discovered that 54 per
cent of all respondents buy products on-
line weekly or monthly. And 34 per cent
of those surveyed believe that their mobile
phone will become their main purchasing
tool in the future.
These figures aren’t surprising, and it
certainly emphasizes the significant influ-
ence that the Internet has on retail market-
place trends. Unfortunately, surveys alone
cannot tell us how to take full advan-
tage of that trend.
The pursuit of a truly frictionless transaction that can be com-
pleted with the fewest barriers, clicks, and keystrokes is fueled
by improvements in payment methods, technology, and modi-
fied consumer behaviors. This has prompted some of the biggest
companies in the world to try their hands at re-inventing retail
transactions: Apple Pay; Walmart Pay; Google Wallet; Amazon
Dash. All these solutions are geared towards the same goal: an
enhanced shopping experience with effort-
less purchasing.
Lotteries operate in an industry with a
solid and reliable bricks-and-mortar retail
tradition that is increasingly looking to
digital experiences to maintain relevance,
grow player bases, and compete with other
forms of entertainment. But in a world
where people will be able to purchase just
about anything, anywhere and with little
more than a wave of their smartphones,
how will they compete?
NeoPollard Interactive exploits the lead-
ing edge of retail technology to ensure that
lotteries can augment the proven sales per-
formance of draw-based games via bricks-
and-mortar retail networks with mod-
ern online tools to capture and convert
new players.
Many lotteries have already established
a solid web presence with traditional cus-
tomers, many of whom are very comfort-
able going online to check winning num-
bers for draw-based games or monitor jackpot amounts. That
familiarity presents an enormous opportunity to take those cus-
tomers and introduce them to new games and features that can
dramatically expand a lottery’s player base.
However, there are other advantages. Products such as interac-
tive draw-based games offer players—particularly consumers that
may not fully understand how the games work—a simple, error-
CLICKQUISITION:
How lotteries are only a few clicks away
from broadening their player bases.
neopollard.com