RafflePress Pro

The prize decides the list, and almost everybody chooses wrong

It is the only thing to understand about a giveaway, and it gets settled before installing anything.

Give away a latest-generation phone and you will get thousands of entrants in three days. They will be competition hunters: people with an account created for it, entering forty a week, who will unsubscribe from your newsletter the moment they learn they have not won. You will have paid for a phone in exchange for a list that buys nothing.

Give away your own product, or a bundle of what you sell, and you will get far fewer entrants. But each of them has raised a hand to say they want exactly what you sell. That list is smaller and worth a great deal more.

RafflePress Pro builds giveaways, contests and rewards in WordPress without the cost of external platforms.

What it does

• Giveaways and contests built inside your own site.
• Rewards for actions, which is the mechanism that multiplies participation.
• No platform commission, because the giveaway lives on your site.
• The data is yours, not a middleman's.

The giveaway being on your site and not elsewhere changes the outcome

It is the practical difference from running the giveaway on a social network, and it goes beyond the saving.

The traffic reaches your site. Every entrant and everybody they forward it to lands on your domain, sees your catalogue and may end up buying without winning anything.

The email addresses are yours. On a social network you get followers, who belong to the network and vanish the day the algorithm changes. An email is yours and still works three years from now.

You can reward the actions that suit you. An extra entry for following the account, another for sharing, another for viewing a product. That is where a giveaway stops being a gift and becomes a campaign.

The legal side, which with giveaways is more serious than it looks

Worth settling before publishing, because a badly framed giveaway can be considered regulated gambling.

The terms, published and accessible. With dates, who may enter, how the winner gets chosen, when and how it gets announced, and what happens if they do not reply. It is not bureaucracy: it is the first thing anybody complaining will ask you for.

Careful with requiring a purchase to enter. In a fair number of places a giveaway requiring a purchase stops being a promotion and becomes a lottery, which needs authorisation. The usual safe route is always having a free way of entering.

The prize is taxable. Depending on the value and the country, there are withholding or reporting obligations falling on the organiser, not the winner.

Social networks have their own rules. Several expressly prohibit conditioning entry on tagging friends or sharing to a personal profile, and half the giveaways you see break them.

None of this complicates the project, and all of it gets solved by writing decent terms before starting.

Requirements

It needs WordPress. Worth having settled where the emails you collect go: a newsletter service and an unticked consent box.

Alternatives in the catalogue

If yours is a contest with voting rather than a random draw, that is a different mechanism: TotalContest manages contests with entries, judging and votes, and works very well in photography, recipes and creative work.

If you sell the entries rather than giving them away, then you are in raffle territory and the regulation has to be well understood: Raffle Ticket Generator generates numbered tickets over WooCommerce, and Lottery for WooCommerce builds the draw product type. Pomana is the complete theme for that kind of site.

And if what you want is capturing subscribers without giving anything away, the discount wheel is another formula that works: Spin Wheel for WooCommerce.

Frequently asked questions

What prize should I offer?
Your own product. A generic prize attracts competition hunters who will buy nothing from you.

Does it charge commission?
No. The giveaway lives on your site and the data is yours.

Can I require a purchase to enter?
It is delicate. In many places that turns the giveaway into a lottery. Always leave a free route.

Are legal terms necessary?
Yes, published and accessible, with dates, requirements and how the winner gets chosen and announced.

Can I ask people to tag friends?
Several networks expressly prohibit it in their promotion rules.

And if it is a contest with votes?
Then it is not a giveaway. There are specific contest plugins that manage it better.