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General Betting
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I was just reflecting on how hated this site is becoming to its customers. I don't know of any business that can survive very long with the level of distrust, contempt and frustration that the customers of Betfair show.
The only thing similar I can think of at a similar level are tax collectors, power company and other state monopolies
The only thing similar I can think of at a similar level are tax collectors, power company and other state monopolies
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i mean, imagine a store or a gas station that you similarly dispised and received poor service. You would simply not go there any more...how long can BF continue? Not long, imo, with this very serious customer service problem.
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BF customers years ago really enjoyed the site...rebels agaisnt the bookmakers monopoly, etc..but people have turned against BF now.
Technical issues aside...without a satisfied customer base, BF is finished. |
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You summed it up with the word "Monopoly", Snapper
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Does **** have similar problems?
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We pay Premium Charge for this piece of crap. Customer service is complete joke and nearly every day website is down. I wish that one day there will be betting exchange without PC, cross-matching, technical issues and reasonable liquidity. Not gonna happen here...
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introduction of the PC was a watershed, imo. not just because of the transformative effect it had on customers' perception, but also because the hostility meant BF withdrew behind the barricades and stopped listening to its customers.
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The thing is that I'm sure they have the bones of a reasonable service for their customers who really matter.
The India game just over had 16 million traded--how was that poss. w/ the site down? I wd guess that their big clients in India, who for all we know may be illegal bookies, have them on speed-dial, and bf are also taking prices from a handful of big cricket market-makers. It's only the comparative small fry betting on minority events like racing that are left out. This is exacerbated by bf trying to cream off as much they can of these markets with theor own bot. |
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They need an operation wh/ holds details of matched, unmatched and SP bets on a separate system to the betting interface & servers.
Then when the site goes down, it shd be poss. for everyone logging into a second site to see where they stand. As long as bf have some semblance of competition, bettors wd be able to manage most of their positions. Instead they seem to be taken entirely w/ their pants down when the same thing happens every Sat. |
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The India game just over had 16 million traded--how was that poss. w/ the site down?
That was traded before the crash about 20 overs into SA innings. Most cricket matches have been getting those kinds of numbers, this one being on a saturday and no minnow invovled was a bit bigger, but only maybe twice as big. |
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It was down for chunks of the Ireland and England games too
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OK, Lori.
Can they not anticipate the amount of traffic they will get from lots of big concurrent sporting events? If they are the victim of big DDoS attacks, can they not simulate the stress their system will come under? If bots are gumming the site up, shd they not first of all cancel the cross-matcher? There can be no security or pleasure in taking positions and trading them off until they sort the site out. |
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The Management
Date Joined: 27 Dec 00 Add contact | Send message When: 12 Mar 11 17:23 Joined: Date Joined: 27 Dec 00 | Topic/replies: 1,077 | Blogger: The Management's blog Signing in. I had nothing but praise for them until about 2006 but from that point - never has any business gone down so far and so quickly in my estimation. Customer Service is non-existent, Communications are non-existent. ................................ 2006? what happened in 2006? Looking at the betfair reports.... 2003-2006: Revenue up 4.5 times (32m to 145m) Profit up 3.4 times (7.5m to 26m) 2006-2009: Revenue up 2.1 times (145m to 303m) Profit up 1.3 times (26m to 33m) |
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Betfair share price hitting all time low today.
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My sense is that a handful of big players got themselves into a position where they cd extract a 'rent' from betting activity, mostly on football and horses.
Bf's reaction was, 'we want a slice of that pie' and developed a strategy that saw them progressively taking from punters with the pc and skimmer and adding new features that their original userbase aren't interested in. How can they go back? They need a broad betting offering to get any growth at all and are run by a second generation of management who don't share the vision of the founders and original horse bettors. |
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I am amazed it isnt considerably lower to be perfectly honest.
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frog2
Date Joined: 01 Feb 08 Add contact | Send message When: 12 Mar 11 17:55 Joined: Date Joined: 01 Feb 08 | Topic/replies: 152 | Blogger: frog2's blog The Management Date Joined: 27 Dec 00 Add contact | Send message When: 12 Mar 11 17:23 Joined: Date Joined: 27 Dec 00 | Topic/replies: 1,077 | Blogger: The Management's blog Signing in. I had nothing but praise for them until about 2006 but from that point - never has any business gone down so far and so quickly in my estimation. Customer Service is non-existent, Communications are non-existent. ................................ 2006? what happened in 2006? Looking at the betfair reports.... 2003-2006: Revenue up 4.5 times (32m to 145m) Profit up 3.4 times (7.5m to 26m) 2006-2009: Revenue up 2.1 times (145m to 303m) Profit up 1.3 times (26m to 33m) Betfair was there first (with flutter) and have a dominant position. If a company comes along with an exchange platform that is technically far superior to that of Betfair, ti will still be extremely difficult to beat them. Consider the fact that the QWERTY keyboard was laid out in a way to place commonly used keys far apart so that they wouldn't jam the typewriter. The Dvorak keyboard layout allows users to type faster and with greater accuracy, yet QWERTY is still the standard, despite being demonstrably inferior. I believe Dvorak will take over eventually, but it could take decades. |
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11th March...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/11/betfair_problems_fixed/ "We did anticipate some wrinkles as we dealt with the backlog of improvements after the move. We've had about 30 releases to push through – a really intense period of activity – and a short window to get them done before spring racing starts." i have worked in specialist IT. granted it would be ridiculous for BF to tell its customers about every single upgrdae in what must be a continuous development process, but it would have been nice to know that they were embarking on such an unusual period of upgrades. also in "serious" IT systems which absolutely must not fail there is a parallel suite for dev work which slowly takes to load until it becomes the real system and then you flip over and start working on the old system as the new parallel suite. i hope some people end up walking for this. |
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'Bf's reaction was, 'we want a slice of that pie' and developed a strategy that saw them progressively taking from punters with the pc and skimmer and adding new features that their original userbase aren't interested in.'
Betfair set themselves up as a betting exchange. I dont see why they waste time and resources trying to be something different that appears to be doing little for profits. The premium charge, cross matching, going off shore to boost retained profits are just tinkering to get every last penny out. It is taking them further and further from Andrew Black's original idea. it seems very short termist. In 2006 they had a functioning exchange making them £25m a year after taxes etc and they had a strong community that would have walked off a cliff for them. Now what have they got? An exchange tht barely works and alot of angry customers. |
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Without the exchange though they're nothing, nobody's going to use Betfair solely for an arcade, they'll go to fred or billy or joe for that stuff because they walk past their shops every day.
The exchange is the method by which they have to attract the addicts, I'm not sure Betfair are who they think they are. |
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I agree w/ Zola that they shd have been able to avoid outages, esp. really long outages, by preserving proper back-up systems.
The prob. is that there's a disconnect between the money guys, the tech guys and the site's users. The original management were actual punters and punters manques who made something that provided a better service (and for winners, took about half of the benefit for doing so). The current management do not seem to have the same sort of feel for how punters, esp. winning punters, will use the site, so end up being overwhelmed when India are playing cricket, Arsenal are playing Man. Utd. and France playing rugby on Imperial Cup day. Do the IT team know what the Six Nations or Imperial Cup are? |
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Don't you think Betfair are trying their hardest to keep the site open? It's not in their interest to have it off line is it? Give them some sympathy and while you are it why don't you lot actually offer your services to improve it
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What drives me nuts 'First time on Betfair?' no piss off, clicking on a link on the homepage to the match you want to bet on and being brought to some mad microsite that has everything but an exchange "where's the lay, how much liquidity is there!!??", the constant phone calls from their CS "so how you finding betfair, have you made any money" - "you've Premium charged me, why are you asking me am I making bloody money on a phone call, why don't you just check your fricken system!?"
Then your site goes down for the whole of Saturday I got very lucky today although I was bloody fuming at one point before a lucky goal saved my ass. |
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lori this is very true i know the only product they have thats interests me is the sports exchange,i reckon you will be the same everthing else does not interest me in the slightest if i wanted i can get a fix for the rest elsewhere.they must realise that the only thing that sets them apart is the sports exchange and without that they are just another fish in a big pond with nothing to make them stand out.
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Lori
Date Joined: 20 Apr 04 Add contact | Send message When: 12 Mar 11 18:17 Joined: Date Joined: 20 Apr 04 | Topic/replies: 31,759 | Blogger: Lori's blog Without the exchange though they're nothing, nobody's going to use Betfair solely for an arcade, they'll go to fred or billy or joe for that stuff because they walk past their shops every day. ............... Q3 FY10 Sports Revenue £56.6m Games £14.3m Poker £5.2m So the exchange is the key. The other stuff has nothing unique to offer. |
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Pile of shyt. They are finding time to delete anti-Betfair threads off the forums when the site is still phucked.
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why don't you lot actually offer your services to improve it
they don't pay well enough. |
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Do it for free...
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In fairnes Cain, I've always thought Betfair did a pretty fair job of letting us vent our opinions about them within reason.
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What like their Q & A Sessions, that read more like a phucking advert.
Carefully selected questions with formulaeic answers that give Betfair a chance to portray themselves in a good light. |
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Not like that, I mean like this thread.
They don't pull much unless it blatantly advertises the opposition which is obviously over the line. They've had a pretty brutal 2.5 years on this forum and for the most part let most of it stay up to be read. |
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jimmy69
Date Joined: 11 Apr 01 Blogger: jimmy69's blog Add contact | Send message When: 12 Mar 11 18:30 Joined: Date Joined: 11 Apr 01 | Topic/replies: 13,130 | Blogger: jimmy69's blog Do it for free... A random guy picked in a crowded street would be able to suggest obvious improvements if he possesed a modicum of common sense. |
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Where cd they have got any growth from, if they weren't going to have a broad poker and arcade offering?
The long-term game is regulatory change in Japan, China and America. Meanwhile their British racing franchise had matured. Their small clients are price-sensitive punters and their handful of big clients traders, market makers, those w/ a trusted edge and high-rolling mugs. They failed to entice the casual punter who wasn't in a shop on a Sat. but didn't care too much about losing a manageable amount of money. Their attempts to broaden the appeal of the site to make it more fun and/or comprehensible for punters have only crocked its functionality and alienated the original userbase. |
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Not only have they managed to alienate the original users but the fixed odds bookies have fought back massively. If I can 'get on' with everyone on Oddschecker then I'm almost guaranteed to get a better price after commission for the biggest markets via fixed odds (let's the face most of the big companies are making around 101% books among themselves on the likes of 90 minute match prices).
So Betfair has the issue whereby I can actually get better odds on the biggest markets and on the smaller markets which Betfair do have better odds I can't get a decent size stake on. Try having any sort of decent anti post bet on here, it's impossible - or even during the World Cup I had a particular interest in the corner markets and there was absolutely no liquidity on here. |
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Jimmy - they don't want to know
Have to agree here, their focus is not on the websites, the abortion of the new in play page and this forum tells you that the people in charge dont know how to run a high availability forum never mind website |
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I don't know anything about the technical difficulties in running such a huge interactive facility like we have here, I imagine it's a nightmare, but is it that difficult that it must crash every week?
Do programmers/software experts etc, not have the answers to run a stable site? Genuine question, is it too technically difficult, or is it simply incompetence? If it's the latter, why aren't the guys sacked and replaced? |
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good points raised. Things started to go downhill with the introduction of the PC. Then the arcade stuff and the virtual racing...everything away from the simple, great idea of fan-fan betting that everybody loved.
Nowadays users don't know if this is an arcade or a bookmaker. The whole concept of an exchange seems to have been lost. Why are we here? What are all doing here? I'm only here because of the API and laying liquidity. I've already got one foot out the door (another exchange) and I think I'll sadly be forced to leave BF sooner rather than later.I don't want to go, but there are limits to what abuse(the customers, FFS)should have to sustain. |
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when you visit the site, theres so much crap loading
thats the problem |
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The short answer is high availability costs. People do it every day for lots and lots of different sites. It just costs money to implement.
If you fail to deliver then your job will be under pressure, the head of service delivery in this period will be under pressure for sure. My money is on incompetance or over estimating competance. Some senior technical people are in jobs that are to big for them. There grasp of the issues poor, imo |
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There is surely another prob., tho--that the interests of winning and marginal bettors are not aligned w/ those of the service provider, and that the management do not think like experienced punters.
The background against which all of these changes have been implemented has been of declining profits and a maturing horse market. The people at bf will have been asking themselves, 'how do we get more revenue and growth?' Allowing their longstanding winning players, esp. small players, to carry on doing their thing was in no way a priority. |