Background

Sports.com came into being in July 2002, when UK based SportingBet , a publicly-traded company, purchased the Sports.com website. The stability of an established firm and the marketability of the Sports.com brand combined to create one of the most popular online betting destinations, one that offers a myriad of events, promotions and betting options.

Navigation

Perhaps the strongest feature of the Sports.com website is its intuitive interface and navigation structure, based on the omnipresent vChip betting system. Finding information, betting odds or betting tools rarely takes more than 2 clicks and data is presented in clear and unambiguous terms. The betting software is not the most elegant but is functionally sound and easy to use. The process of placing a bet is also very intuitive (a player selects a sport, bet type and then places their wager). The bet ticket is a very convenient feature, providing users with a constant view of their account balance and outstanding wagers.

US Audience

Despite being based out of the United Kingdom, the site caters mainly to a US target audience, offering wagers for each of the four major American Sports, as well as major NCAA sports. In addition to Football, Basketball, Hockey and Baseball, players can also wager on Golf, Tennis, Racing, Boxing and European Football.

Registration

Creating an account is simple, although a deposit of $20 is required prior to placing any bets. First-timers receive a 10% premium on their deposit and all other deposits are augmented by 5% free of charge. Credit cards, Western Union and Wire Transfers are all acceptable methods of depositing cash into an account. Sports.com reimburses deposit fees of over $200 for Western Union and over $500 for Bank Transfer fees.

Withdrawals

When ready to make a withdrawal, players are presented with three options: 1) receiving a bank draft by Priority Mail (5-10 business days, for no extra charge); 2) receiving a cashier's check by FedEx (1-5 business days, $20 fee); or 3) Wire Deposit (3-5 business days, $10 fee). For FedEx withdrawals of $500 or Wire Transfers of $1,000, the site charges no withdrawal fees.

Customer Service

Customer service is a key factor in critiquing any Sportsbook and Sports.com offers a variety of ways to gather information. 24-hour support is available by telephone and online chat. When calling in for support, an 800 number is provided for US customers. A call during prime time to this support number surprisingly resulted in zero wait time and a representative who spoke English well and was relatively knowledgeable and courteous. Detailed questions regarding available lines, however, were deferred as being "available on the website." A second call resulted in a representative who could not answer the basic question of whether one "can bet on Wimbledon tennis," saying "you probably can."

Online Chat

The online chat representatives, while helpful, tend to cut and paste responses quite a bit. Often they do not answer the question asked or respond with too much information that needs to then be "sorted through" by the customer. Overall, however, the quality of service was above average. While the representatives did not always know the answer right away, they made the effort to find out and remained extremely polite when bombarded with question after question.

Security and privacy are always key concerns with online purchases. All monetary transactions at Sports.com are performed via 128-bit encryption to protect the customer.

The site also performs IP-address tracking to closely monitor visitor movements and betting activity. This is done for two primary reasons: Ostensibly to deter and capture fraudulent wagerers, but also to monitor overall trends and valuable user-specific data. This may raise privacy concerns with some players. The Privacy Policy on the Sports.com website, however, indicates that only aggregate data is used. The policy also indicates that Sports.com reserves the right to contact users at their discretion, presumably to promote both their services and those of third party advertisers. Such advertising, thankfully, is strictly opt-in.

Bottom Line

Despite leading the pack of online sportsbooks in terms of users and transactions, Sports.com shows no signs of slowing down. Regular visits to the website turn up a wide array of promotions, ranging from 10-cent baseball lines to $2,000 daily giveaways. Indeed, stickiness of the user base is the core component in long-term business success and Sports.com has done a solid job of ensuring their users will return time and again. Among its peers, Sports.com stands as one of the best sport wagering sites available.