Brittany Maslo
A competition website looks, from the outside, like a fairly ordinary WooCommerce store. Products, prices, a basket, a checkout. Buy a theme, install a few plugins, done.
It is not that, and the reason is worth understanding before you spend money either way. A prize competition site has legal structure sitting inside the entry flow rather than in a policy page. Under Section 14 of the Gambling Act 2005, a paid entry has to pass a genuine skill question. Under Section 339, a free postal entry route has to run alongside the paid one at equal visual prominence with identical odds of winning. Neither of those is a page you add. They are conditions on the template.
Then there is the part that catches almost every first-time operator. Stripe and PayPal both classify competition ticket sales as restricted and will close the account once transaction monitoring identifies the category, sometimes mid-draw with funds held. Shopify does not permit UK prize competition transactions at all. Which is precisely why so much of this sector runs on WordPress and WooCommerce: it is the platform flexible enough to work with the specialist acquirers who will actually take the business.
So the question for most operators is not whether to use WordPress. It is who should build it. Here are seven options, ranked by how much of the awkward part they own.
1. Nera Marketing
Top of the list because it is a bespoke WordPress and WooCommerce build that the operator owns outright, from a team that does almost nothing else.
Around fifty UK competition sites delivered, with the compliance architecture treated as structural rather than as content added at the end. Skill question gating, free entry route at equal prominence, instant win and lucky dip logic, ticket bundles, draw automation and entry list publication all ship as standard. Bespoke builds are quoted from £2,995, competition-grade hosting from £99 a month, and the stated timeline is around 21 days from deposit to live.
The part that matters more than the feature list is sequencing. Payment gateway introduction runs in parallel with development rather than after it, and the site is built to the acquirer’s requirements before the merchant application is submitted. Support for the Meta legal opinion letter, needed before you can run paid social, is offered separately from £1,195. If you want to see how the competition build differs from a standard WooCommerce store, the Nera Marketing competition websites service page sets out the platform features in detail.
Trade-off: it is a bespoke engagement with a bespoke price. If you want to test whether a niche has an audience before committing capital, this is more build than you need at that stage.
2. Zap Competitions
One of the longest-established specialists in the UK sector, working exclusively with competition and raffle businesses and building on their own Competition Suite platform.
Strong on the compliance side. Zap will manage the full Meta RMG application on a client’s behalf and can introduce a specialist solicitor for terms and conditions, which removes two of the more tedious pre-launch tasks. Their process gives clients direct access to the delivery team, which operators moving from an unresponsive generalist agency tend to value highly.
Trade-off: you are building on their platform rather than a WordPress install you control. That is a reasonable exchange for the sector knowledge, but it is a different ownership position to a bespoke WooCommerce build, and worth being clear-eyed about before signing.
3. Design Hero
A Scottish agency running competition and raffle work as a focused service line, and unusually strong on what happens after launch.
The offer extends well past the build into niche selection, branding, social ad management and growth strategy, with legal templates and payment gateway approval support included. They hold 70-plus five-star Google reviews, which in a sector where a lot of operators have been burned by a previous supplier is a meaningful signal.
Trade-off: the breadth is the point, and it suits an operator who wants a partner rather than a contractor. If you already have marketing handled internally, you may be paying for capability you will not use.
4. Reffle
A custom competition platform with a visible UK and Northern Irish client base, including Vogue Competitions in Derry, Competition Fox in Torquay and Millionaire Competitions.
End-to-end delivery covering UX and UI design, payment services, legal documentation and compliance support, with one-to-one growth management on some engagements. Several of their clients moved across from a previous agency, which suggests they are used to migration work rather than only greenfield builds.
Trade-off: proprietary platform again rather than a WordPress build. Ask directly what happens to your site and your data if you later decide to leave.
5. Nexa Development
A development-led option building custom competition, prize draw and raffle platforms from £3,500, with payment integration, automated winner selection and analytics as standard.
Sensible choice if your requirement is genuinely technical and unusual, or if you need something integrated with systems you already run. The framing is engineering rather than marketing, which suits operators who already know exactly what they want built.
Trade-off: less sector-specific commercial guidance than the specialists above. You will need to arrive with your compliance and acquisition thinking already done.
6. Developer Rocket
A WordPress and WooCommerce development shop that takes competition work alongside other builds, and publishes guidance on the sector’s legal and platform requirements.
Worth a conversation if you value WordPress depth over category specialisation, or if you have an existing relationship. The stack will be familiar and the site will be yours.
Trade-off: the sector knowledge is broader rather than deeper. Ask specifically how they handle the free entry route, skill question gating and the specialist merchant application, because those three answers separate a build that works from one that gets rebuilt.
7. RaffleX
Not an agency, a no-code raffle website builder, and included because it is the honest answer for a particular kind of operator.
Instant wins, unlimited competitions, built-in analytics and a DIY route that gets you live quickly. Their higher tier adds a full build and setup by their team, solicitor liaison for terms, RMG application support and payment gateway integration help, advertised at £1,999 up front and then a monthly fee plus a per-order charge.
Trade-off: you are renting. The monthly fee and per-order cut continue for as long as the business does, and at volume that becomes a real drag on the margin you calculated when you priced your tickets. Genuinely good for validating a niche cheaply. Less good as a permanent home for a business doing serious numbers.
When a theme is still the right answer
Worth saying plainly, because this is not an argument that WordPress themes are inadequate.
If you are running a one-off charity raffle, a promotional prize draw attached to an existing brand, or a free-entry competition with no paid tickets at all, a good theme and a form plugin will do the job perfectly well. The complexity described above exists because of paid entry at volume, and if that is not your model then none of it applies to you.
The line is roughly this: the moment money changes hands for a chance to win, you inherit the payment processing problem, the Section 14 and Section 339 structure, and the DCMS Voluntary Code requirements that came into effect on 20 May 2026 covering age verification, credit card limits and spend controls. Below that line, build it yourself. Above it, the specialist premium is usually cheaper than the rebuild.
Four questions to ask any of them
Whichever route you take, these separate a supplier who has done this before from one who is about to learn on your budget.
Which payment provider will you introduce me to, and at what point in the project? If the answer is anything other than a named specialist acquirer introduced before development starts, keep asking.
Show me how you handle the free entry route on a live site. You are looking for something presented in parallel with the paid option at genuine equal weight, not a link in the footer.
What happens to my site if I leave? On a bespoke WordPress build the answer is that you keep it. On a hosted platform it is a different answer, and you want to hear it before you sign rather than after.
How does the site behave in the last hour before a draw closes? Traffic in that window can run at ten times normal load, on checkout and ticket-count pages that cannot be cached. A supplier who has run that event will tell you how they load-test it. One who has not will tell you their hosting is fast.
