Read more about the William Hill Plus Card<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\nBetfred<\/h3>\n
Being the only major high street bookie without a card scheme, there is less to say about Betfred.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not possible to bet instore with online funds, or to link your bets in any way, but you can deposit and withdraw to and from your online account in store if you want to.<\/p>\n
The process of depositing cash into your online account is easy enough, you just produce the readies and ask the shop assistant to put it into your online account. They ask for details to make sure it\u2019s going to the right place and after a quick call to customer services, hey presto, your cash has been digitalised.<\/p>\n
There aren\u2019t many obvious scenarios where this would be particularly useful, unless you are a bit dodgy and do everything using cash to avoid tax; but of course, there would be legitimate reasons for doing it too. We pretended we had a girlfriend who went through our bank statements and this was the perfect way to avoid a telling off.<\/p>\n
The withdrawal side of this is much more useful, especially if you keep a decent chunk of change in your account and find yourself in need of cash but without your bank card, for example. You could essentially use your local Betfred like an ATM.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a more laborious task though, because the customer has to phone customer services to request the withdrawal, then the rep phones the shop you want to get the cash from to make sure they have enough money in the till, then they get back to you to let you know it\u2019s ok for you to get your money, and then you have to show some ID to the cashier before they hand it over.<\/p>\n
All of these steps are there for good reasons, but in this day and age it does feel incredibly antiquated. If our local Betfred is anything to go by hardly anyone ever does it either; the two staff members we spoke to said they had done this just twice before in their 5 years of working there.<\/p>\n
Quick Verdict: No card available, hard to find a reason to use their outdated deposit\/withdraw in shop service, but it is at least a possibility.<\/strong><\/p>\nFinal Thoughts<\/h2>\n
<\/p>\n
For us, the store cards felt like a forgotten extra at most of the shops we tried, underutilised and often not well understood either. For all the marketing messages encouraging customers to \u201cJust ask a friendly member of staff who will be happy to help you\u201d, we didn\u2019t find a single staff member who fully understood the cards.<\/p>\n
All were very friendly and tried their best to help, but it\u2019s clear that they aren\u2019t trained properly to advise on the idiosyncrasies of their use.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s probably because not many people use them.<\/p>\n
The issue for us, is that 75% of the time the cards aren\u2019t making life any easier, meeting a need, or solving a problem.<\/p>\n
Having to manually input shop bets into an app in order to track them is a hassle, especially when you can track them using the website if you place your bets online \u2013 and given that you need to access your online account to make these cards work in many cases why would you not just place the bet there while you were at it?<\/p>\n
The ability to get your winnings from an online bet in cash in store is about the only reason to use one of these cards, but even then, withdrawals don\u2019t take the sort of time they used to these days, not at big brands with high street shops anyway. So it\u2019s not really a problem that desperately needs solving anymore.<\/p>\n
Paddy Power was by far and away the best brand for utilising their store cards, blowing the others out of the water when it comes to exclusive offers, and the cash card really is useful for anyone who bets a lot and keeps a fair amount of money in their betting account.<\/p>\n
From our experience, after spending a lot of time in betting shops testing these things out, we noticed that most people still place their bets in cash. The feel of pound notes in the hand is probably part of the appeal for people who mostly bet instore, and the cards aren\u2019t enough of a reason for people who would usually bet online to do things any differently.<\/p>\n
So in our view they aren\u2019t going to save the high street, and unless bookies make them seriously more appealing with truly exclusive offers for cardholders or something like that, they might even fizzle out and be scrapped all together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In order to stay relevant and encourage bettors to keep betting on the high street rather than abandoning it for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":225,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"page_type":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2024-05-04 21:44:44","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"page_type"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7193"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7193"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8050,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/7193\/revisions\/8050"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"page_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettingwebsites.org.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/page_type?post=7193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}