It becomes harder every day for mobile sportsbook companies to find a niche in a competitive and crowded American marketplace. Fanatics Sportsbook appears to be trying to be different by making sports bets similar to the other things we buy online.
As a ubiquitous licensed sports apparel and merchandise vendor in the United States, that seems like a sensible approach. Especially considering the database of 90 million user accounts the company planned to bring to the sports betting game even before purchasing PointsBet for $225 million in July.
Fanatics will begin fighting for its place beginning today when it officially launches its mobile app in Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Tennessee after six months of beta testing. In Ohio, Fanatics retail sportsbooks will also open soon at the Columbus Blue Jackets’ Nationwide Arena and Cleveland Guardians’ Progressive Field.
The Fanatics sportsbook app is designed to reach for a user’s comfort zone quickly.
“There’s a bit of a Spotify-esque feel to this,” Fanatics Betting and Gaming chief product officer Scot McClintic said in describing the “Discovery Feed,” a sort of lobby where sports news and betting elements mingle after opening the app.
Algorithms will eventually create a Google-esque feed of information and bet types in keeping with individual bettors’ tastes.
“What we don’t want to do is overly personalize this feed in a way where we’re showing the wrong things to customers at the wrong point in time. But as customers use the app more and start volunteering information, like what [they] like to bet on, what days [they] like to bet, are [they] a specific player’s fan, or a team fan?,” McClintic explained, “we’ll take those data points as well as betting history and try to personalize this feed.”
Fanatics App Code Designed to Speed, Ease Registration
Registration is one of the first crucial transactional moments in the relationship between a new sports betting customer and a sportsbook. McClintic said that Fanatics’ efforts to create native apps for both Android and iOS could reduce the process to “well less than a minute.” It’s possible, he added, because registration has been separated into two processes.
“We made a conscious choice to say we want to break up registration into two journeys. Journey One is ‘What’s your email? What’s your password to set up your kinetics ID?’,” McClintic continued. “Once you do that, once you enter in your email and password, we immediately prompt you with the signup offer that you’re eligible for, depending on the channel that you came up in. … You see that promo right there. So that’s like, ‘Wow, that’s really great. I’m eligible for this. That’s cool.'”
The second part of the process is the typical sharing of identifying information and funding sources, but McClintic said this route has been expedited by building code natively into iOS and Android.
“This is built directly into Apple’s operating system. And I don’t know, [a] single-digit percentage of operators, if not lower, have made that choice because you take a lot of pain to do it. It’s a lot harder, but once you do it, you’re happy with the benefits it will provide over time,” he said. “One of those benefits is being able to allow customers to prefill a lot of their information along the way through the registration flow. … We automatically continue what you want to the next step.
So it’s sort of like a tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. A lot of customers have this information already there. So we are seeing customers that are willing to complete the journey. And then customers that do are just like tapping their way through and it becomes very seamless. There’s not very much typing. Much more tapping of prefilled information.”
Where Fanatics Sportsbook App Launched Today:
Fanatics Sportsbook App Details:
- It’s in the code: The Fanatics Sportsbook app was built “natively” on iOS and Android platforms, which isn’t common within the industry. For coders, this means apps were built specifically for each operating system. For users, this means it’s designed to translate into a sleeker user experience. The Fanatics bonus code is also worth checking out if you’re interested in unlocking promotions and offers.
- FanCash: This virtual currency “can be converted dollar-for-dollar” into Bonus Bets,” according to Fanatics. Or it can be used to purchase merchandise at the company’s apparel site. FanCash earning structure: 5% FanCash on same game parlays; 3% on parlays; 1% on straight bets.
- Fanatics Sportsbook Discover Page: Bets centering around bettors’ favorite teams, sports, or markets will be curated in one area for easy access. The area will also include big games, trending bets, promos, and reward offers.
- Withdrawal Tracker: Follows withdrawals step-by-step through the process.
- Search: A search function including a search bar, recent searches, autocomplete, synonym/alias, and deep linking to leagues, events, and markets.
- Universal Fanatics customer ID, which will allow for transfer of money and credits through the company’s verticals.
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