Boosts

Two ways to make a competition pay more than it says on the tin, without touching anyone's odds.

	What gets bigger	What triggers it
Instant Win Boost	Chosen instant win prizes	A window of time you set
Main Prize Boost	The main prize	Money the customer puts on their card

They share one name. Whatever you call the mechanic — "Boost", "The Hunt", anything else — customers see that name on both. See Name your boost.

Instant Win Boosts

Make chosen instant win prizes pay more than usual, for a few hours only. "Find the £5,000, win £7,500 — 3 hours only." It is a way to push sales through a quiet evening once a competition has already banked enough profit to fund it.

Where to find it: on a competition's own instant wins page, Admin → Competitions → (your competition) → Instant Wins.

When a prize counts as boosted

A prize is boosted if its ticket was picked up while the boost was running. That is the moment the customer's ticket numbers were reserved for them — when they added the tickets to their basket and went to checkout, not when the payment finally cleared, and not when they open the reveal.

That is worth being clear about, because it is the whole point:

• A customer who buys during the boost and opens their reveal three days later still gets the boosted amount.
• A customer who bought yesterday and opens their reveal during the boost gets the normal amount.
• A customer who checks out at 8:59pm on a boost that ends at 9pm still gets the boosted amount, even if their card takes another minute to go through. They bought what you advertised.
• Someone who reserved their tickets before the boost started does not get it, even if they pay once it is running.
• Postal entries work exactly the same way, based on when the ticket was allocated to them.

So a boost gives people a reason to buy right now, which is what you are running it for.

Start a boost

1. Open the competition and go to its Instant Wins page.

2. Tick the prizes you want to boost. Only unclaimed cash and site credit prizes can be ticked — see What can be boosted. To boost just one prize, use the ⚡ action on its row instead.

3. Click ⚡ Boost selected. A slide-over panel opens, so you keep your place in the list.

   On a competition with thousands of prizes, don't tick them one at a time — click ⚡ Boost by group instead and see Boost every prize of a kind.

4. Under How much more do they pay?, choose:

   • Multiply — each prize pays a multiple of its own value. Pick x1.25, x1.5, x2 or x3, or type your own. A £5,000 find at x1.5 pays £7,500; a £100 find at x1.5 pays £150.
   • Set a value — every prize you ticked pays the same flat amount, whatever it was worth before.

5. Under When does it run?, choose Start now or Schedule it, then pick how long it runs for: 1, 3, 6 or 24 hours, or type your own. The panel tells you exactly when it will end.

6. Under What customers see, check the name and blurb. This is your site-wide boost branding — see Name your boost. Tick Theme this boost differently if this one competition needs its own name.

7. Optionally add an Internal label such as Sunday night push. Only you ever see it.

8. Read What it could cost. This is the number to stop on — see Know what it will cost you.

9. Click Start (or Schedule).

If you started it now, it goes live immediately. Customers already sitting on the competition page see the banner appear without reloading.

Boost every prize of a kind

A competition can hold tens of thousands of instant wins, and "boost every 50p find" is not something you want to tick one row at a time.

Click ⚡ Boost by group on the Instant Wins page. The panel lists every group of duplicate prizes with how many of each are still to be won:

£0.50 Site Credit      293 still to be won · £0.50 each
£1.00 Site Credit      196 still to be won · £1 each
£5.00 Cash              56 still to be won · £5 each

Tick the groups you want, set the dials the same way as any other boost, and every unclaimed prize in those groups is boosted together. Select all takes the lot.

Two things worth knowing:

• A group is counted when you start it, not when you opened the panel. Prizes are being won while you are choosing, so the number armed can be a little lower than the number listed. If the cost has moved by the time you press Start, the panel tells you the new figure and asks you to look again rather than starting a boost you never approved.
• Groups that would not gain are left out. Set a value of £50 and the £100 finds are skipped, listed with a reason, and excluded from the cost. See What can be boosted.

What can be boosted

Only cash and site credit prizes that nobody has won yet.

Prize type	Can it be boosted?
Cash	Yes
Site Credit	Yes
Physical prize	No
Competition tickets	No
Any prize already won	No

Physical prizes are left out because "boosting" a games console means swapping it for a better one, which is a different job. Competition-ticket prizes are worth whatever the target competition's tickets cost, which is not yours to change from here.

Rows that cannot be boosted show a crossed-out ⚡ with the reason on hover, and they cannot be ticked — so you cannot accidentally queue up a boost that would only half apply.

Only the prize's own amount is boosted. If a cash prize also offers a site credit alternative, that alternative is left alone — which usually means the boosted cash simply beats it, and the winner takes the cash.

Know what it will cost you

The What it could cost box in the panel updates as you change the dials. It shows:

• Each prize — its normal value struck through, what it will pay, and the extra.
• Worst case extra cost — what the boost costs you if every boosted prize gets found while it is running.
• Net margin if every boosted prize is found — your margin on this competition after that worst case.

This is a ceiling, not a forecast. Most boosts end with some prizes still unfound, and those cost you nothing. But the ceiling is the number to make the decision on: if the worst case takes your margin negative, it will take your margin negative.

While a boost is running, the Total Prize Cost and Net Margin cards at the top of the page show the same worst-case figures, marked with a ⚡. Hover either one to see what it was before the boost.

Watch a boost while it runs

A banner sits above the prize table for as long as a boost is scheduled or running. It shows:

• the boost's name and its internal label
• a live countdown to the end
• Worst case left — what it could still cost you, and how many boosted prizes are still out there
• Paid so far — the extra you have already handed out, and how many prizes have been found
• End boost early

Boosted rows in the table show their normal value struck through beside what they are actually paying, with a ⚡ marker.

The competition's buy-out figure follows the boost too. While the window is open, the unclaimed instants are counted at their boosted amounts, so the buy-out line (and the amber or red icon on the competitions list) can change for the length of the boost and says how much of the figure is boost uplift. It falls back to normal as soon as the boost ends or you end it early.

End a boost early

Click End boost early on the banner and confirm.

Prizes already found keep their boosted amounts. Those customers bought while the boost was on and won fairly, and nothing is taken back from them. Ending the boost only means that tickets bought from that moment on pay the normal amount.

The banner clears, customers on the competition page see the boost disappear without reloading, and the prizes become available to boost again.

A boost also ends on its own when the countdown runs out. There is nothing to do.

Main Prize Boost

Pay a winner extra on top of the main prize, if the order that bought their entry also put money on their card.

The case it was built for is a free-entry competition. "Win £100 cash, free entry" is a hard thing to make money on. With a Main Prize Boost, a customer who adds £3 of other tickets to the same order wins £1,000 instead of £100 — and the customer who entered for free still wins the £100 they were promised.

Nobody's odds change. Every entry has exactly the same chance it always had. The only thing that changes is what a winner is paid.

Where to find it: Admin → Competitions → (your competition), in a card called Main Prize Boost, directly under the main prize fields.

Set one up

1. Open the competition and scroll to Main Prize Boost.
2. Switch it On.
3. Card spend needed — how much the customer must spend on the order's other competitions, paid by card. £3 is a good starting point on a free-entry comp.
4. Add-on if they win — what a boosted entry pays on top of the main prize. This is paid separately from the prize itself.
5. Paid as — Cash (withdrawable) or Site credit (spendable on your site).
6. Optionally tick Count spend on this competition too. Off — the default — means "spend it on something else". On turns the rule into "buy £X of this competition", which is a different offer.
7. Optionally choose the competition the one-tap button adds. Leave it empty and your pushed competition is used instead, and if you have not pushed one, whatever your site would have recommended anyway.
8. Check Most this could cost — the add-on multiplied by the number of winners — then press Save at the bottom of the page. The boost saves with the rest of the competition; the card shows Unsaved changes until you do.

What counts as spending on your card

This is the rule customers will ask about, so it is worth knowing exactly:

• Card money only. Site credit spent on the order does not count. Every message customers see says "on your card" for this reason.
• The order's other competitions, unless you ticked "count spend on this competition too".
• After discounts. What counts is what they actually paid, after quantity breaks, early bird pricing and any promotion code.
• Free entries never qualify. Postal entries, entries you comped by hand, and tickets won as a prize all carry no card spend, so they cannot reach the threshold. A completely free order does not qualify either — there is no card payment on it.

If the order is refunded or cancelled before the draw, the entry loses its boost and goes back to being an ordinary entry — the customer got their money back, so there is nothing to boost. After the draw nothing is taken back.

One filler clears every boost in the basket

The rule is per order, not per entry. If a customer has three boosted competitions in one basket and adds a single £3 filler, all three qualify — each one asks "did this order carry £3 of card spend on its other lines?" and each one is told yes.

That is worth knowing before you run boosts on several free-entry competitions at once. It is not three times the risk — the odds do not change, each competition draws separately, and a customer would have to win all three main prizes to be paid all three add-ons. But if you are budgeting on "£3 buys one boosted entry", it does not.

What it does to wallet credit

If a customer has site credit and it would have covered so much of the order that their card payment dropped below the threshold, your site holds a little credit back so their card payment still clears it. A customer with £4 of credit and a £5 basket on a £3 threshold pays £3 on the card and uses £2 of credit, rather than using all £4 and losing the boost they were shown.

They see why, in the basket and again at checkout: "⚡ £3.00 stays on your card to keep your Boost".

Nobody is trapped by this. Unticking Use Wallet Credit or removing the extra tickets both work as normal — either one only ever puts more on the card, never less.

And your site will not hold credit back if doing so would leave a card payment it cannot take — one below your minimum card payment, or over the customer's own monthly spending limit. In that case the credit is used as normal and the boost is simply not earned, rather than the customer being stopped at checkout with no way forward.

Where the one-tap button sends them

The button adds tickets from whichever competition you named under competition the one-tap button adds. If you left that empty, it uses your pushed competition, and failing that whatever your site would have recommended anyway.

Two things it will not do:

• Offer a competition that cannot get them there. If nothing in your catalogue can close the gap inside your own per-order and per-customer limits, or inside what is left in stock, the customer sees the nudge without a button rather than a button that fails.
• Offer tickets that would make their basket cheaper. If adding tickets to a competition they already have would cross one of your quantity breaks and reprice the whole line down, that offer is skipped — otherwise the customer would pay and end up further from the threshold than before.

If you ticked count spend on this competition too, the button offers more of the boosted competition itself, because that is what clears the threshold.

Changing a boost that people have already qualified for

The moment one entry qualifies, what you promised is what you owe. From then on:

• You can raise the add-on, any time. Everyone who has already qualified gets the higher figure, including entries bought yesterday. That is why raising it is allowed at all.
• You cannot lower it, change cash to site credit, or switch the boost off. All three are refused with an explanation. If one reaches Save, the rest of the competition still saves and the message at the top of the page says the boost didn't.
• You can still change the spend threshold and the paired competition. They only decide who qualifies from now on, and nobody has been promised anything about future orders.

Before anyone has qualified, everything is editable.

Switching a boost off keeps the record of it — nothing is deleted, so you can always answer "what was this competition offering in March".

Know how it is doing

The boost card shows Boosted entries — how many entries qualified, out of how many entries there are. "412 of 1,030 · 40%" is your attach rate, and it is the number to watch: it tells you whether the threshold is set somewhere people will actually reach.

Too low and the threshold is probably too high, or the paired competition is too expensive to reach it in one tap. Too high and you may be paying an add-on to people who were going to spend that much anyway.

What customers see

• On the competition card in your grid: a gold ⚡ {name} to £1,000 badge. When the main prize and the add-on are both cash, or both site credit, the two are shown as one figure. When they are not — a car plus £900 cash — the add-on is quoted on its own, because they are two separate things arriving.
• On the competition page, under the ticket picker: either "Add £1.50 more on your card and if you win the main prize we'll upgrade your win with an EXTRA £900!" with a one-tap button, or a teal "earned ✓" once they are there. Before anything is in the basket it states the rule instead — "Spend £3 or more on your card in the same order, and if you win the main prize we'll upgrade your win with an EXTRA £900!". On a free competition that line names the free tickets: "…on your card at checkout alongside your FREE tickets…". An add-on paid as site credit is always named as such, so "an EXTRA £900" is never read as cash.
• After they add the competition to their basket: a pop-up offering the tickets that would get them there in one tap. You can switch this off — see below.
• In the basket, a progress bar on the boosted line, with the shortfall or the earned state.
• At checkout, a confirmation of every boosted entry, and the "stays on your card" line if any credit was held back.
• On the winners page, a ⚡ Boosted +£900 chip beside the winner, showing what was actually paid.

Turn the pop-up off

Some operators do not want a dialog interrupting the add-to-basket flow. On the boost branding panel there is a switch: Offer the one-tap boost pop-up.

Turning it off keeps the basket row and the nudge on the competition page. It only drops the pop-up. A customer who declines the pop-up is not asked again for a while — that window is the same one your other basket offers use.

One boost per competition

A competition has one Main Prize Boost, with one threshold and one add-on. Several tiers on one competition ("£3 for £500, £10 for £1,000") are not available yet.

Things to know

The add-on is paid separately. A winner gets the main prize exactly as they always would — including choosing cash or credit instead of a physical prize if you offer that — and the add-on lands in their wallet as its own line on top. Your books show the two figures apart, so you can always answer "what did the boost actually cost me".

It is paid straight away. Even where the main prize is a physical item the winner has yet to choose about, the add-on goes into their wallet at the draw.

Every winner is worked out on their own. On a competition with several winners, one may have qualified and another not. Each is paid on their own order.

A word on free entry routes

If a competition relies on a free postal route rather than a skill question, letting customers pay to reach a bigger prize is a decision for you and your legal advice. Your site does not enforce anything either way.

Name your boost

Your site has one boost name, blurb and icon, used every time a boost runs — instant win boosts and main prize boosts alike. It defaults to Boost with a ⚡, and you can change it to whatever suits your site — The Hunt, Power Hour, whatever your customers will recognise.

To change it, open the boost panel and click Edit the site-wide boost name and blurb, or open a boost's branding from the same place.

An individual boost can override the name, blurb and icon for one competition. Use it for a themed comp — a "Feeding Frenzy" on a fishing competition — and leave the rest on your site-wide name.

"Jackpot" is not available

The word jackpot is reserved for the separate Jackpot feature and is refused in boost names and blurbs. Two different prize mechanics sharing that word would confuse your customers about which one they are looking at.

What customers see

While a boost is running, on the competition page:

• A banner near the top: your icon, "{name} is on", your blurb, a live countdown, and the headline prize written as "the £5,000 pays £7,500".
• In the instant win prize list, every boosted prize shows its normal value struck through beside the boosted value, with a BOOSTED chip. If you boosted only some of a group — four of the ten £100 finds — the chip says so. Those boosted tickets are listed first in the group's winning tickets, each marked with your boost's icon. If you boosted the whole group, the tickets stay in number order with no icons, because the chip already covers it.

And on the reveal:

• A customer who wins nothing sees a boost card under "Better luck next time", telling them what the big find is paying right now and how long is left.
• A customer who wins sees their boosted amount. As each win lands in the game, the prize banner along the bottom carries a ⚡ BOOSTED TO £50.00 line under the prize name, and the same mark sits beside the prize on the "Your Prizes" list at the end. The prize keeps the name you gave it, which is what it was worth before the boost, so both figures are on screen together.

And on the order they have just paid for:

• Winning ticket numbers are marked with a ⚡ instead of the usual sparkle, and hovering one reads "£25.00 Site Credit — boosted to £50.00". The prize keeps the name you gave it, which is the value it was worth before, so the order says what actually landed in their wallet alongside it.
• Their wallet history shows the win as two lines: the prize's own value, then the uplift on top, named after the boost. The two add up to what they were paid.

All of it appears and disappears live. A customer sitting on the page when the boost starts or ends sees it change without reloading.

Things to know

One boost per competition at a time. A competition can only have one boost running or scheduled for any given moment. If you try to start one whose window overlaps another, you are told which one and until when. Back-to-back is fine: a boost ending at 9pm and another starting at 9pm is a hand-off, not an overlap.

The reason is what customers see. The banner has one name, one blurb and one countdown, so a second boost running at the same time would have nowhere to appear — its prizes would show their normal value on the prize list while quietly paying more. Rather than let that happen quietly, the second boost is refused.

You cannot change a boosted prize's value. While a prize is in a running or scheduled boost, its value field is locked and the reason is shown. The boost recorded what the prize is worth and what it will pay when you started it, so changing the underlying value would leave the boost describing a prize that no longer exists. End the boost first. Descriptions and images can still be edited.

Scheduled boosts are not announced. A boost you schedule for 7pm is invisible to customers until 7pm. That is deliberate: telling people "the boost starts at 7pm" tells them to stop buying until 7pm.

Odds do not change. A boost changes what a prize pays, never how likely it is to be found. Nothing about your published odds changes.

Refunds work the same as any other instant win. Cancelling or refunding an order removes the win and puts the prize back in the pool. It does not pull the money back out of the customer's wallet — that has always been true of instant wins, and a boost simply makes the amount bigger. Check the customer's wallet if you refund a boosted win.

Your books show the split. A boosted win is recorded as two entries in the customer's wallet: the prize's normal value, and the extra under the boost's name. So you can always answer "what did The Hunt actually cost me".