This spring several states will be offering lottery ticket sales online. But North Dakota State Lottery is waiting to decide if online ticket sales have any potential here. The plan is to evaluate the results on other states to determine ether North Dakota should try too.

Some local businesses don’t really think it would make a difference in sales. Petro Serve USA’s CEO is not worried about the extra online competition of lottery sales that North Dakota has just started to considered. For him, both lines of business don’t necessarily have to affect each other as customers will keep going to convenience stores to get the products they need. National lottery

Kent Satrang of Petro Serve USA says “…convenience stores are definitely a pennies business, so we really do rely on store traffic counts. So the more people coming in the stores the better off we’re gonna do. But, I don’t really think it’s going to put us out of business if they sell lottery tickets online.”

Retailers that sell lotto tickets in North Dakota only end up seeing 5 percent of every dollar, and when you have a line getting longer and folks waiting to pay for gas and soda it’s time consuming to ring up a lotto ticket. Satrang says those 5 cents on a lotto ticket are not necessarily a big difference, “convenience stores are based upon convenience, so you can get your gasoline, milk, groceries, and the lotto, but (lotto tickets) it’s not really a big deal when it comes to revenues for a convenience store.”

Obviously, convenience stores do not profit from lottery as much as they profit from other sales. Lottery numbers

Retailers like Satrang have been selling North Dakota lottery ticket for quite a while and without their assistance they likely wouldn’t have sold the 24 point 3 million tickets in 2010, say Director of the North Dakota Lottery. But in general, it is hard to say whether offering the tickets online will help the lotto, or hurt businesses.

For Satrang, the effects of online gambling are more of a concern as they can affect more an individual than sales “having access to online gambling at home I think is dangerous but that’s up to the government, and not up to us.”

Right now, the North Dakota Lottery does offer some lottery tickets online but, it takes about three weeks to set up an account and you can’t get a check of your winnings unless it’s five dollars or more. North Dakota Lottery officials say online sales currently only amount to about one and a half to two percent of all lottery sales

So, just like in many other states, is it up to the Lottery officials to decide if the online sales will benefit or not the industry and up to customers to see whether this possibility will affect their buying style. Only after the possibility becomes a reality, will Lottery officials realize if the choice they made was right for North Dakota.