Jackpot

Run one site-wide pot that grows every time a customer buys, and give every order a chance to win the whole thing. You choose how fast the pot grows, how likely a win is, and whether a share of each pot is pledged to a cause.

Where to find it: Admin → Content → Jackpot (/admin/jackpot)

The jackpot is separate from instant wins and from your competition draws. It is not attached to any one competition: it is one pot that every qualifying order feeds, and every qualifying order gets one chance at it.

Nothing happens until you open a pot

Turning the jackpot on is only half of it. The jackpot needs an open pot to run, and the first one is always yours to open. After that you decide: by default you open each new pot yourself after a win, or you can have your site do it for you — see Run it perpetually.

Set up your jackpot

1. Go to Admin → Content → Jackpot.
2. Under Settings, fill in:
   • What customers call it — the name shown on your site, e.g. "Mega Pot".
   • Paid as — Site credit (spendable on your site) or Cash (withdrawable). This decides where a winner's money lands.
3. Under How the pot grows, set the Percentage of eligible spend (up to 50%). A 2% rate on a £100 order adds £2 to the pot.
4. Set the Seed for a new pot — what a pot starts at, funded by you. You can override it each time you open one.
5. Optionally set Stop growing at to cap the pot. At the cap the pot stops growing but is still winnable. It must be above the seed, or the pot would open already full.
6. Under Chances of winning, choose Counted per and the Odds. The page restates the two together in plain English underneath — read that line rather than doing the sums yourself.
7. Turn Jackpot is running on.
8. Click Save settings.
9. Click Open new pot (see below). Until you do, the jackpot is switched on but dormant: orders neither grow it nor play for it.

What counts towards the pot

Only card payments grow the jackpot. Wallet credit was already counted towards the pot when the customer bought it, so spending that credit does not add to the pot a second time — an order paid entirely from a wallet contributes nothing and earns no chances.

Free entries and postal entries neither grow the pot nor earn chances, as there is no spend to reward.

Chances of winning

Counted per	What a customer gets
Every £1 spent (default)	Chances in proportion to what they spent. A £50 order gets 50 times the chance of a £1 order.
Ticket	One chance per ticket on qualifying competitions.
Order	One chance per order, whatever it was worth. A £1 order and a £500 order have the same shot.

The odds you set are per whole unit: at 1 in 250,000 per £1 spent, a £1 order has a 1-in-250,000 shot and a £50 order has fifty times that. On Order, 1 in 50,000 means exactly that per order, however large or small.

There is no minimum spend

Every £1 spent counts part-pounds too, right down to the penny. A 50p order gets half the chance of a £1 order, and a 1p order gets a hundredth of it. Nothing is rounded away and there is no threshold to fall under, so you never have to think about a minimum order value.

This matters most if you sell tickets under £1. Your customers still play for the jackpot on every order, in proportion to what they spent.

Ticket and Order have no threshold either. Any order with card spend on it plays, whatever it came to.

Splitting a basket up

On the two proportional options there is no way to improve the odds by gaming how an order is placed:

• On Every £1 spent, £50 in one order and £50 across ten orders both earn the same total.
• On Ticket, ten tickets count as ten however they were bought.

Order is different, and you should pick it knowing that. One chance per order means ten orders are ten chances, so a customer who splits a £50 basket into ten £5 orders gets ten shots at your pot instead of one, for the same money. That is what a flat per-order chance is, not something we can round away, so the option sits last in the list and is off unless you choose it.

The number to watch is your pot, not the basket. Because a chance costs the same whatever the order was worth, one order is worth your pot divided by your odds. One order costs a customer at least your minimum card payment. When the first number passes the second, placing lots of cheap orders is worth more to a customer than those orders cost them.

That is the part worth pausing on: your pot grows on its own. Settings that are comfortable the day you save them cross that line later without you touching anything.

Say your odds are 1 in 2,000 and your minimum card payment is £5. One order costs at least £5, and is worth your pot divided by 2,000. At a £4,000 pot that is £2 an order, comfortably the right way round. At a £10,000 pot it is £5, and the maths has flipped. The Jackpot page works this out against your own settings and your live pot when you select Order. While you are comfortably under the line it just names the pot to watch for; once you cross it, it spells the sum out and tells you what to change.

Three things keep it in hand, and all are yours:

• Cap the pot. Stop growing at is the direct control. Set it below the point where the sums flip.
• Lengthen the odds, or raise your minimum card payment (Admin → Settings → Checkout). Both move the line further away. With no minimum set there is no floor on what a chance costs at all, and no pot size at which this stops being worth a customer's while.
• Gateway fees work in your favour here. Every extra order is a separate card transaction you pay a fee on, so cheap orders cost you more than the pot alone suggests. This is the same reason the minimum card payment setting exists.

Pick Order when the simpler promise is worth it to you: "every order has a 1 in 50,000 chance to win the pot" is an easier line to put on your site than a per-pound figure. Pick one of the proportional options when you would rather the odds track what people actually spend, and not have a number to keep an eye on.

Changing the odds mid-pot is safe

Orders already placed keep the odds they were played against, and your new figure applies from the next order onwards.

Open a new pot

1. Click Open new pot.
2. Check the Seed amount. It defaults to your configured seed. This is your money and it goes straight into the winnable pot.
3. Optionally tick Pledge a share to a cause, then name the cause and set the share of each contribution (1–90%).
4. Click Open pot.

A pledge is fixed for that pot's life

The cause and the share cannot be changed once the pot is open, because every contribution is split against them as it arrives. If you need different terms, wait for the pot to be won and set them on the next one.

About cause pledges

Paying the pledged amount to your chosen cause is your responsibility. Your site records and displays the running total but does not transfer any money.

The pledged share is never part of what a customer can win. The figure shown on your site is always and only the winnable amount, with the cause total shown separately beneath it.

If you have Open the next pot automatically after a win switched on, the pledge carries over: each new pot raises for the same cause, at the same share, starting from zero. To stop raising for it, turn that setting off first, then open the next pot yourself without a pledge.

Run it perpetually

If you would rather never think about opening a pot again, tick Open the next pot automatically after a win in Settings. The moment a pot is won, your site opens the next one itself: seeded with your Seed for a new pot amount, and raising for the same cause at the same share if the pot that was just won had a pledge.

It is off by default, and two things are worth knowing before you turn it on.

Every pot costs you the seed. That is exactly what it costs today when you open a pot by hand with the default seed. The difference is that it now happens on its own, as often as your jackpot pays out. If your seed is £500 and your odds pay out weekly, that is £500 a week. Set the seed to £0 if you would rather each pot started from nothing.

Your site skips the won state. Normally a win leaves the jackpot showing "won £X" until you open the next pot. With this on the pot flips straight back to a live, growing total, so there is no gap for that celebration to appear in — which also means Keep the jackpot on show after a win has nothing to show while this is on.

The winner is still celebrated everywhere else, and none of it changes: the confetti on their order confirmation, the pop-up if they missed it, their email, your email, the winners ticker, your Winners page and your activity feed.

To go back to opening pots yourself, untick it. The next win then leaves the jackpot dormant as before.

Orders paid in the split second between the two pots

A win and the next pot opening are effectively instant, but not literally. An order that lands in that gap neither grows the new pot nor plays for it. It is a fraction of a second on a live site, and it is deliberate: a new pot only ever owns money paid after it opened.

Adjust the pot by hand

If you need to correct the figure — you added money outside the platform, or a pot was seeded wrongly — click Adjust pot, enter the amount (negative to take money out) and a reason. The change is recorded against your account in the audit log.

This changes the winnable amount only. The pledged cause total is left exactly as it is, because it records what real contributions pledged.

What happens when somebody wins

1. The winner's money is added to their wallet straight away — site credit or cash, whichever you chose.
2. They see the win on their order confirmation, with confetti. If they closed that page before seeing it, they get it as a pop-up next time they visit.
3. The winner gets an email.
4. You get an email telling you the jackpot was won, and whether the next pot is already open or waiting for you.
5. The win appears in your Winners list at the bottom of the Jackpot page, and in your dashboard activity feed.
6. Your site switches to a celebration: "{your jackpot name} won £X", with the winner's name if you have chosen to show it.

The jackpot then stays dormant until you open the next pot. While it is dormant, orders neither grow a pot nor play for one.

That last part is the bit you can change. With Open the next pot automatically after a win on, step 6 does not happen and there is no dormant gap at all — see Run it perpetually.

A win is final

Wins are never reversed. If you later refund the order that won, the refund takes that order's contribution back out of the pot as normal, but the win and the payout stand.

Refunding a losing order gives away a second set of chances

A refund takes the money back out of the pot, but it does not take back the entries that order already played. So a customer who is refunded and then rebuys has paid once and played twice.

This is only reachable when you refund, so there is nothing to switch off. Just be aware of it if a customer starts asking for refunds on orders that did not win.

Exclude a competition

By default every competition grows the pot and earns chances. You can turn either off per competition, and the two are independent.

On a competition's Feature Toggles:

• Exclude from Jackpot Building — spend on this competition does not grow the pot. The rest of a customer's basket still does.
• Exclude from Jackpot Entries — spend on this competition earns no chances to win the jackpot.

So a competition can grow the pot without playing for it, or play for it without growing it. Full steps are in Competition Management.

Show the jackpot on your site

Nothing appears on your storefront until you put it there. There are two places:

• Header widget — a live pill showing the pot in your site header. Add the Jackpot widget in Your Site Header. You can override the name for that widget only, choose whether it shows the name and amount or just the amount, and choose where tapping it goes: the jackpot block on your homepage, a page of your own, or nowhere at all.
• Page block — a full-width panel with the pot, an optional heading, subheading and button. Add the Jackpot block in Pages & CMS.

Both read the same live figure, so they can never disagree.

Show the odds

Publishing your odds is a setting on the Jackpot block, not here — that block is the only place they appear, since the header widget only has room for the figure and its label. Add the block from Pages & CMS and switch on Show the odds under the amount.

No other part of your jackpot setup is ever visible to customers — not the contribution rate, and not how any individual order's chance turned out.

Show pennies on the running total

Your running total is rounded to whole pounds by default, so a pot sitting at £12,480.47 reads as £12,480. The pot itself is always tracked to the penny; this only decides how it is written on your site.

Turn on Show pennies on the running total in Jackpot if you would rather it read £12,480.47. The upside is that the figure visibly moves with each order, which makes the pot feel live. The downside is a number that never looks tidy, and on a busy site it changes constantly. Try it and see which suits your site better; nothing about the money changes either way.

Give it up to a minute to appear on your storefront. Your site caches the jackpot figure so it is not fetched on every page load.

One thing this setting never touches: an amount that has been won. That always shows in full, pennies and all, on your site, in the winner's celebration and on your winners pages, because it is the exact sum going into their account. A £1,240.50 win is never written as £1,241.

Keep the jackpot on show after a win

Between a win and you opening the next pot there is a gap, and this decides what your site does with it. Left on, the jackpot stays visible showing the amount that was won and the winner's name. Turned off, the jackpot disappears from your site for that gap rather than showing an empty pot.

How much of the name appears follows your site-wide winner name setting, so you set it once for the whole site — see Choose how customer names appear publicly.

This setting also controls whether jackpot wins appear on your winners pages, below.

If you have Open the next pot automatically after a win on, there is no gap, so this setting has nothing to show on the jackpot itself. It still decides whether jackpot wins appear on your winners pages. Turn the automatic setting off and this one matters again straight away.

Jackpot wins on your winners pages

Jackpot wins appear alongside your other winners, not just in the storefront celebration:

• The winners ticker shows the newest jackpot win at the front for 7 days after the win, then it takes its turn with your other wins.
• The Winners page lists every jackpot win in with your main prize draws, in date order, showing the pot name, the amount won and any cause total the pot raised.

Both follow Keep the jackpot on show after a win: turn that off and jackpot wins leave your winners pages too. Winner names follow the same site-wide name setting as everywhere else.

To take a single win off your public pages — a winner asks not to be named, say — open Jackpot and use the eye toggle in the Winners table. The win and the payout are untouched; only whether it is displayed changes. Click the toggle again to show it.

Who can change what

Role	Can see it	Can change it
Admin	Yes	Yes
Shop Manager	Yes	Yes
Marketing	Yes	No

Marketing can see the settings and the live pot, because they build the header widget and the page block and need to know what customers are seeing. They cannot change anything: opening a pot spends your money, and the odds decide payouts.

The Winners list is the one thing they do not see. It names a customer and what they were paid, and marketing staff are kept out of customer financials across the whole platform. The card simply does not appear for them.

Troubleshooting

The pot shows £0 on my site, or nothing shows at all. Check that Jackpot is running is on and a pot is open. The page tells you both at the top. With no pot open there is nothing to show, so the widget and the block hide themselves rather than advertising an empty jackpot.

I turned it on but the pot is not growing. Only card payments grow the pot. If your customers are paying from their wallets, or the competitions they are buying are excluded from jackpot building, the pot will sit still. Check your Contribution figure is above zero, and check the pot has not hit Stop growing at.

The pot has stopped growing but people can still win it. That is the cap doing its job. At the cap the pot stops growing but stays winnable. Raise or clear Stop growing at if you want it to keep climbing.

Nobody has won for weeks. That is what the odds mean rather than a fault. Check the plain-English line under Chances of winning — at long odds and modest spend a win can be a long way off. Shortening the odds (a smaller number) makes wins more frequent and more expensive.

Somebody won and the jackpot vanished from my site. It goes dormant on a win, which is by design. Open a new pot to start it again. If you would rather your site celebrated the win in the meantime, turn on Keep the jackpot on show after a win — or, to skip the gap altogether, turn on Open the next pot automatically after a win.

I turned on the automatic setting but the jackpot still went dormant. Almost always the pot did open and your storefront has not caught up: give it a minute, since your site caches the jackpot figure. If it is still dormant after that, check your Seed for a new pot is below Stop growing at — a pot that would open already full is not opened. Your site also rechecks every hour for a few hours after a win and opens the pot itself if it finds the jackpot dormant, so a one-off blip fixes itself. After that it stops trying and leaves the next pot to you, rather than opening one at your cost days later. You can always open the next pot by hand at any point.