Best Betting Payment Methods

Online Betting Payment Methods

In amongst all the excitement of choosing what online sports betting you fancy a flutter on, and who can offer you the best free bets for your custom there soon falls the far-less interesting but no-less important questions of how you plan to place your own real-money stakes.

With online sports betting sites you’ll need to pick a payment option to manage your free player account, so what are the options and which is best for you?

Transacting on the Internet is now an extremely common consumer activity and that demand has also driven lots of competition to create ways to pay that are easy to use, and offer bomb-proof security to prevent ne’er do wells getting their grubby mits on your cash.

When managing your player account(s) at the best online sports betting sites you’ll not only want a way to fund your fun, but also a way to withdraw your winnings too, so it’s well worth considering the available options to make a canny choice of the ‘right tool for the job’.

Credit or Debit Cards are the most popular. But what if you don’t have, or want to use a bankcard such as these? Well, no problem – elsewhere we cover the most popular alternatives in more detail but these broadly fall into these categories:

Credit or Debit Card

Currently the most popular and commonly found payment option with the best online sports betting sites is to use a credit or debit card issued by Visa or Mastercard. These offer near-instant deposits into your player account, and also usually allow you to withdraw cashable funds back with typically no more than a three to five day processing time involved. Visa and Mastercard also operate exceptional security measures so easily tick the boxes of being quick and reliable ways to securely manage a player account.

E-wallets

With the ‘E’ standing for electronic, these are online payment services that let you stuff a virtual wallet with real-money using another payment method. With money in your e-wallet you’re then free to spend it on any online goods or services where the service is accepted. PayPal, NETeller and Skrill are the big players in this market, and often amongst the payment methods at online sports betting sites. E-wallet’s also can be used to withdraw funds from your player account and commonly offer one of the quickest routes to do this.

Crypto Currencies

At the very cutting edge of digital payment services is the use of what are generally called ‘crypto currencies’, of which Bitcoin is the de facto standard. In effect this is digital ‘cash’ you can purchase online to pay for other goods and services. It’s a less usual option to find at online betting sites, but it is becoming more widely used and could offer an interesting option if the privacy of your betting activities is important to you.

Prepayment Cards / Codes

Bought from a local shop that offers the service, these are tokens issued with unique codes that you then enter on the site that accepts their use. Paysafecard is a popular option found in the UK, Paysafecard has replaced Ukash.

Bank Transfer, Cheques and eCheques

These are still an option at many online betting sites, but are a bit of a hangover from the era before services like PayPal, Paysafecard and Bitcoin expanded the ways to play if you didn’t want to use a bankcard. Longer processing times and transaction fees make this type of payment option far less attractive for players today.