How hated Betfair is by its own customers

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.

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.

You summed it up with the word "Monopoly", Snapper

Does **** have similar problems?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

It was down for chunks of the Ireland and England games too

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.

The Management
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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 share price hitting all time low today.

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.

I am amazed it isnt considerably lower to be perfectly honest.

frog2
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The Management
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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.

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.

'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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

Lori
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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.

...............

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.

Pile of shyt. They are finding time to delete anti-Betfair threads off the forums when the site is still phucked.

why don't you lot actually offer your services to improve it

they don't pay well enough.

Do it for free...

In fairnes Cain, I've always thought Betfair did a pretty fair job of letting us vent our opinions about them within reason.

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.

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.

jimmy69
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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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

when you visit the site, theres so much crap loading
thats the problem

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

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.

They're not in an area where they can grow infinitely, however the customers they had (both winners and losers) would be pretty easy to milk for many millions a year.

The obsession with growth is ridiculous and has a chance of achieving the opposite. What's wrong with earning 100m a year and leaving it at that!

This is why I had to abandon trading on Betfair. Crashes. Banks lost. Another major selling point of the exchange comcept lost....trading is not feasible on Betfair. BTW...I am over at the purple site tonight...everything running fine. I've never seen a crash there. Not one in 5 + years.

There's more sh1t on this site than a blocked karsi.

A public Ltd company that doesn't give  a sh1t.

Purple doesn't have as many people to cater for.

I'm still on Betfair because I make money on Betfair.

I hate the changes that have been made personally but I doubt I'd make as much money if it wasn't for Betfair sucking in so many mugs to make the markets no longer an efficient indicator of true price. I'll stay as long as I am making money, I would have made more money today (and indeed got extremely lucky with one result in particular going my way - which I would have traded out of had the system not went down) but that's the way it goes.

i can see why upgrading their site is a nightmare, since they have very, very few periods in the week that are genuine 'downtime' to perform these upgrades (most businesses do it over the weekend for example, which is obviously a non-starter for betfair), and they have practically zero buffer if things go wrong

having said that, those issues make it even more important that betfair DESIGN THINGS WELL and KEEP THINGS SIMPLE, which they seem to have totally failed to do

design principles like modularity, functional cohesion, minimal coupling etc (basically techie ways of saying that components should not break each other... ie the new cr@p should not be allowed to impact the exchange)... these things seem to have been ignored for some reason

There's more sh1t on this site than a blocked karsi.

A public Ltd company that doesn't give  a sh1t.



well said that man

Could it be that exchange model is flawed for betting? Financial market exchanges provide a required service that is needed. Investors need to trade stocks. Companies need to trade currencies. The exchanges charge for data level access and commissions. They accept winners and know their place as merely being there to match trades.

The problem with betting is that it is recreational. Mugs have to be brought in Betfair for Betfair and winning customers to fleece. Without the continious stream of mug money Betfair fails. So Betfair tries to take away 'free lunches' from winning customers and keep the profits for themselves.

Genuine question, is it too technically difficult, or is it simply incompetence?

No, many companies manage to do it. You just have to have the will. Its not even that expensive if you do it right, with a decent release procedure and fallback options.

When was the last time Google, Yahoo, Amazon, FT, BBC, etc etc went down?

frog, as I see it the prob. w/ exchange betting is that the same terms that make the proposition attractive to the recreational player (bf's desired bulk client) allow the botted-up winner to take what seems to the company a disproportionate share of the profits.

They can see their markets mature w/ minimal growth in profit, as a few winners monopolise the benefit (or take a 'rent') from everyone's typical betting activity.

Imv, they made a major error in setting up the premium charge in the way they did. Bearing in mind that a charge is a poor way of arresting corruption, they shd have targeted anything that wins at the expense of site functionality and smaller losers i.e. they shd have imposed swingeing data request charges that removed 'technical', rather than price-taking, bots from the site.

I love betfair.
But betfair does not love me back.
When betfair first started I had many a long conversation with friends and basically anyone mildly interested in which I spoke in glowing terms about it and tried to get them to join the site. There was no join a friend bonus back then . I did it because I believed that betfair was the equivalent of the invention of the wheel as far as gambling was concerned.
Fast track it to today. I set the alarm for 4.15am this morning so I could bet on the USA races. I dont like waking up at 4.15 am on a Sunday morning. Like most normal people I like sleeping in on a Sunday morning.
I turn on the computer on and cant log in . i ring the helpdesk(why its called a helpdesk is a total mystery ) ang get told the site is down, has been for a couple of hours,no idea why and no idea when it will be back.
If only there was somewhere else to go.

brendanuk1
12 Mar 11 19:03 Joined: 12 Jan 02 | Topic/replies: 14,249 | Blogger: brendanuk1's blog

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

That and the fact that 2nd rate contractors are now 'employed 'by Betfair to improve the superficial  bottom line for investors

IN response to the initial post - hated is not too strong a word

I have never known a more unpopular outfit - debt collectors and the like are possibly 'liked' by those who employ them -

Combined ignorance and arrogance is a very potent cocktail

frog2
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Could it be that exchange model is flawed for betting? Financial market exchanges provide a required service that is needed. Investors need to trade stocks. Companies need to trade currencies. The exchanges charge for data level access and commissions. They accept winners and know their place as merely being there to match trades.

The problem with betting is that it is recreational. Mugs have to be brought in Betfair for Betfair and winning customers to fleece. Without the continious stream of mug money Betfair fails. So Betfair tries to take away 'free lunches' from winning customers and keep the profits for themselves.

To be fair, most participants on financial exchanges are mugs also, they just have more money to squander. Even large pension funds are often notoriously poor at trading despite the collossal sums they are managing and feeding profits to shrewd operators.


Buy and hold is the way forward for the very large majority, yet it is practiced by a tiny minority.

They're not in an area where they can grow infinitely, however the customers they had (both winners and losers) would be pretty easy to milk for many millions a year.

The obsession with growth is ridiculous and has a chance of achieving the opposite. What's wrong with earning 100m a year and leaving it at that!



I think this sums everything up perfectly. In the pursuit of constant growth which is just not there they are messing up their core business.

The day they introduced the Premium Charge was the beginning of a slow end IMO. It still amazes me to this day that the idea even got beyond the brainstorming stage. Absolute suicide.

They are killing the golden goose.....

The core business is now marketing not technology

PC at least make sense, as it might increase their profits, you might disagree with it but there's a logic there.

BUT Look at the new inplay page. Judging by the forums, their customers pretty much to a man (and woman) hate it, which isn't surprising as it's awful. They don't seem to care - where's the sense in that? Everyone is saying the same thing : we want a stable site with a clean interface, not an unstable site we can't trust with a new interface that .. how was it described by someone the other day ~"is like lego bricks for the visually impaired" or something. [:(]

As a matter of PRINCIPLE I won't play any of these games as I so resented a third of my valuable screen 'real estate' in that new design being devoted to pimping them [>o], so much so that they can't fit the things we WANT to see on!

WE'VE BROUGHT THE SITE BACK
ONLINE AND ARE TAKING BETS!

^ on sports.betfair.com in the box above the markets.

The existence of that exclamation mark tells you everything. In fact, I take umbrage with more than just the exclamation mark. Betfair are 'matching' bets, not 'taking' them in the usual sense (well, multiples, yeah, but...), and the "we've" is used in a sense which reads as if we should all be grateful that they have managed to bring their own site back online! [smiley:crazy]

i hate you betfair! i will make an exchange to destroy you
before i am 30 years old
laugh at me now bitch

I hope than everyone can differentiate between Betfair and the betting exchange concept.

Betting in running (off slow pics believe it or not) changed my life. I still bet off slow pics and make a good wage. It is hard, but it can be done. Betfair as a compabny - I despise.

Betfair have these two things in their favour -

The ability to trade;

In running betting.

However, they are never promoted. Why? Do they want the guaranteed profit of a casino?

Betfair are you listening to all this?

Your customers are talking to you but are you actually taking notice?

Unless you communicate with us how do we know that you actually care? and I mean properly communicate, not some Q and A session.

It is now been many hours since the latest crash and the site is still unstable as you know.

But we have no information as to what is going on...

Is it so hard to keep your customers in the loop?

Is there a customer user group? So our voice can be heard?

On twitter I used to be BFInnoBystander, after yesterday & previous betfair nightmares (premium charge etc etc) I have dropped the BF.  We used to love you betfair, now you are making us hate you....

www.twitter.com/InnoBystander

john92 fantastic post this will be bf downfall they break the exchange golden rule little and often always play the long game and NEVER be greedy. . . imo they will do the almost impossible and ruin a business which has a monopoly. . .

It seems essential to all of us that Betfair dump these stupid arcade games, even though this may or may not have been the cause of the crashes, and return to the core service of a sports betting exchange.
I hope Betfair is listening before it is too late.

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.

............................................

As it happens I had access to the site while its was "down"  I only became aware of it because markets were being suspended and not going in running.  Even the horse racing markets were being suspended 15 minutes before the off to prevent people who did have access exploiting prices from the course.  Although I didn't look at the cricket I find it very hard to believe that you could bet in running on it because you certainly couldnt on the horses or the football

I too was able to access Betfair through my mobile for something like an hour after the main site was down.
  I could have bet on anything that wasn't inrunning.

there were also a couple of periods when the site came back up briefly, and some people profited.

eg, between man u - arse teams being announced and KO, the site was up for a minute or two, and the unders price moved by about 7 ticks.

to me this seems manifestly unfair, as the market makers were unable to remove their offers in response to fergie picking a line-up with 7 defenders in it, which clearly had a material effect on the probabilities.

I was watching from the sidelines, btw - so this isn't pocket talk.

Like many on this thread, i too have been on the Betfair journey and have steadily lost my admiration and respect for them and now find myself pleased when they hit brick walls when trying to expand into overseas markets. They don't deserve any more success imho. The implementation of their own version of FOBTs, the original cross matching which was done without telling customers and was pocketing them money at the expense of customers getting the best possible price, the premium charge because they know their market position is so dominant that they can get away with it and even the recent offshore move to avoid UK taxes was just yet another step away from that moral high ground they used to have a foothold on in comparison to traditional bookmakers. When you see success radically change someone for the worse, it's only human nature to want to see them brought back down to earth and end up on their arse and i view this place in exactly the same way these days.

ewood perfectly summed up. . . .

yeah, good post ewood.

My discount rate doesn't seem to have decayed like I thought it would yesterday.

mine has.

rate doesn't decay till a week after points - is that it?

Your discount rate won't go down unless your points are down into a different 'zone' relative to a week ago?

the points drop on a monday, but the discount rate stays the same till the next monday, so you effectively have a week's grace to get back into the zone you were in before the decay.

EVERY OLD CUSTERMER HATES THEM.Can you blame them

Betfair is a monopoly=premium charge

Betfair poker is not a monopoly=NO premium charge

i am so close to becoming mega rich betfair 
and when i am...get ready..  u will pay for the PC u have stolen from me

Maybe they should try a premium charge for exceptionally consistently profitable poker players and see what happens. If it would lead to a massive walkout, you can see what would happen if other realistic options were available for betting exchange customers.

It could be that in future Betfair is forced to drop PC due to competition, but it's very doubtful. Most PC payers are small players anyway, Betfair would probably sweeten the deal for the big PC players.