Catching Up With the Texas Lottery’s Retail Innovations
- Insights Online
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
The lottery industry is moving forward on a number of fronts to make the retail sales process easier for both retailers and customers, and the Texas Lottery is leading the way.
By Patricia McQueen
Published December 2025
Our year-long retail spotlight series has showcased important recent developments that impact lotteries’ most critical partners – the retailers that sell their products to consumers. We’ve explored retailer commission and incentive programs, the rollout of self-service in Canada, retailer recruitment strategies and recognition programs, and tools and techniques that enhance the in-store lottery presence.
We close out the series with a look at some of the important technology developments that are enabling lottery to be sold in new types of locations, or that ease some of the burdens retailers face when carrying lottery products. No American lottery has done more in this area than the Texas Lottery, which has over 19,000 retailers. The sheer size of the state provides a rich development market for testing any number of new projects, including retailer modernization.
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About 10 years ago, NASPL formally began development of a Lottery Standard API, with a working group consisting of key lottery personnel along with representatives of the Multi-State Lottery Association and a variety of vendor partners. The goal was to facilitate the industry’s retail modernization by simplifying the communications between retailers’ point-of-sales systems and lottery central systems. Among other things, an API would allow more retailers to sell lottery by removing the need for dedicated terminals and systems – something that some retailers and retail categories never saw desirable. It was a big goal, but a critical one for the future of the industry.
The term “in-lane” is often used as a catch-all for these projects and more, but really it just means the ability to sell and redeem lottery products on the retailers’ point-of-sale systems, not on dedicated lottery terminals. There can be one “lane” in a convenience store, or a dozen or more lanes in a superstore – everyone can benefit from these projects.
Initial Steps
The Texas Lottery was all-in from the beginning, with its Lottery Operations leadership spearheading the work on the industry side. NASPL released the first version of the API in 2019, and that fall the Texas Lottery wasted no time releasing a groundbreaking new product, QUICKTICKET. Offered for Powerball and Mega Millions, QUICKTICKET brought about 1,500 Dollar General stores into the lottery fold for the first time; the product was also deployed at select grocery chains.
QUICKTICKET is no longer in the market; changes to the Mega Millions game last April meant that game’s version would need reworking to continue. Retailers decided not to carry only a Powerball version, so the entire product line was ultimately discontinued, at least for now. The product still has potential, according to those who have used it like the Texas and Oklahoma lotteries, especially with consistent support by all parties to build awareness. Yet there are much bigger ongoing projects for the industry.
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Currently leading this work for the Texas Lottery is Delayna Bradshaw, the program’s Retail Projects and Data Analytics Coordinator. She’s been in that role for two years, coming from what was then IGT Texas (now Brightstar Texas), so she knows these projects. Bradshaw emphasized that the work is ultimately about reducing barriers for retailers and improving ease of sale. “Traditionally, selling lottery is a lot of work for retailers, and is unique compared to the sale of any other merchandise. Our goal here is to more closely align the sale of lottery with the sale of any other product in a store.”
At the same time QUICKTICKET was being developed, the Texas Lottery was working with Texas grocery chain H-E-B to create Receipt Ticket, a Powerball or Mega Millions Quick Pick with a defined number of boards printed on the retailer’s plain receipt paper instead of traditional roll stock. It went live across more than 300 Texas stores by September 2021, and work goes on with H-E-B.
Initially, if a player validated a ticket, two receipts would print: one for the customer and one for the store. “H-E-B came to us and explained their desire to streamline that process and make it a bit more efficient,” explains Bradshaw. Now, any validation details are automatically printed on the same receipt that contains a customer’s grocery and lottery purchases, and a separate validation receipt for the store is no longer printed. After all, since these validations are run through the store’s own POS system, and not a separate lottery system, H-E-B already has the validation information in their data files. It’s a seemingly small change, but significant – it uses considerably less paper, reducing costs.
Since launch, more than $1 billion in validations have been processed through in-lane checkout at H-E-B stores, along with substantial Receipt Ticket sales, reflecting how fully the process has been integrated into everyday checkout operations.
Ticket-by-Ticket Activation
H-E-B took on the work necessary for the original Receipt Ticket and their specialized validations process, and also helped launch ticket-by-ticket activation in 2024 with scratch tickets sold at the stores’ business centers. “H-E-B is a fantastic company and partner, willing to collaborate on these initiatives and leading the industry in the process,” emphasizes Bradshaw.
Ticket-by-ticket activation has long been a holy grail for the American lottery industry. “The benefits are just phenomenal. Ticket packs become basically just paper, inactive until the time they are actually sold. That alone is such a huge benefit for a retailer, on top of the accounting benefits.” For players, it speeds up checkout because there are no longer two transactions for each purchase that includes lottery.
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And for the lotteries themselves, it opens up a whole new world of data. “For the first time, we have clear insights into the sale of scratch tickets. Being able to see the granular sales data helps us to better optimize our ordering system.” Taking the guesswork out of the equation not only reduces retail overstocks and inventory shortages at any given location, it helps the team understand sales patterns and seasonal differences. “The technology modernizes data analysis that ultimately helps us design better scratch tickets and launch them at a time for optimal sales.”
Bradshaw is enthusiastic about the future of these projects, and the Texas Lottery team continues to look for other opportunities for expansion using both Receipt Ticket and ticket-by-ticket activation. “It’s really a win-win-win situation, because we’re always thinking of the players, the retailers, and the Texas Lottery beneficiaries.” Although these things have been refined into a fairly simple technology solution, perhaps the biggest remaining obstacle is getting on companies’ software development radar. As a large Texas-only chain with enthusiastic leadership, H-E-B was the logical place to start, but to move forward means working with national retail behemoths. A large national company has competing priorities so it can be challenging to fit lottery into a development schedule. Bradshaw emphasizes the importance of maintaining good and ongoing relationships with all retailers and acknowledges how that can vary across the diverse retailer base in Texas.
Enter LotteryLink
Texas is a testing lab for yet another innovation designed to simplify the lottery process for retailers, Brightstar’s LotteryLink, which eliminates the need for a dedicated lottery terminal and all the related requirements. It also doesn’t require the software integration that some of the other solutions require. The small device connects to a retailer’s POS system, and if a lottery product is scanned, it automatically processes that transaction directly through the Lottery’s central gaming system. For draw games, players receive specialized stock; scratch tickets are recorded with ticket-by-ticket activation. Non-lottery products are simply processed by the retailer’s POS system as always.
Last year, Brightstar successfully completed a proof-of-concept test of LotteryLink with the convenience store C-Mart, in Austin; by all counts it was a very positive test and the retailer was thrilled. Over the past year, Brightstar has revised the product with feedback from that retailer, and the Texas Lottery is gearing up for a pilot test once full software support is completed and retailers are selected.
“It’s a really exciting concept, especially for some of the bigger chains, because they don’t have to devote the time and money to work on integration with multiple lotteries across the country,” explains Bradshaw. “It addresses some of the obstacles that we’ve run into with some of the other in-lane initiatives and has no impact on the player experience.”
She’s particularly enthusiastic about LotteryLink’s potential with convenience stores, because they are far and away the Texas Lottery’s biggest retailer base and reducing lottery pain points for such a critical partner is always a good thing.
More Instant Ticket Options
The progress with draw games is impressive, but instant tickets still account for about two-thirds of lottery sales in the U.S. Convenience stores continue to be the dominant category of lottery retailers, but fewer consumers are visiting those stores. Self-service units have been growing in popularity in all types of retail locations, and automated ticket dispensing solutions are also gaining traction.
Texas has implemented a limited number of Scientific Games’ SCiQ units, which have already been adopted by many lotteries across the country, and is working to place Pollard Banknote Limited’s newer easyVEND. The latter is a four-bin solution that has been added to the checkout lanes in six Foodarama locations in the Houston area. Multi-lane retailers are always a challenge, notes Bradshaw, because most of these types of stores are corporate giants. It can be quite difficult to add another point-of-purchase location in their stores, outside of vending or customer service centers. That’s where a smaller company like Foodarama can play an important role by helping to refine the multi-lane experience as a more nimble retail chain.
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The placement of easyVEND has produced great results, with sales increasing in the six stores by as much as 30%. Retailers are free to choose what four tickets to use in these units, although the Texas Lottery team recommends one each at $2, $5, $10 and $20. Still, there have been impressive results with $30 and even higher price points. easyVEND also offers some retailers some theft prevention with its secure (and physically heavy) dispensing units.
With an attractive ticket display at checkout, easyVEND proves the importance of awareness in what is historically an impulse purchase. Evidence indicates that players are buying the tickets they see in the easyVEND units, and add them to their purchase. Bradshaw adds, “it makes players think about lottery again, and that has had a resounding impact on our sales.”
A Promising Future
While the Texas Lottery is leading the way, it isn’t the only American lottery diving into these types of projects, and there are options for lotteries. Most recently, the Iowa Lottery launched Easy Play last March. In a collaboration with Abacus and supported by Scientific Games, Easy Play allows the seamless sale of Powerball and Mega Millions in the checkout lanes of Fareway Meat & Grocery stores. So far, the program has been successful, generating additional sales at the register for the two games.
These innovations, and more to come, will help position lotteries favorably as the retail industry – and consumer purchasing behavior – continues changing. Removing decades-old barriers to retailer recruitment, and changing the dialogue to highlight ways lotteries are actively trying to make things easier for their retail partners, are essential for growth. “These are all really big steps, providing us with new points of purchase and retailers with security and accounting benefits,” says Bradshaw. “Since Texas was the first lottery in the nation to implement some of these initiatives, we’re still working with our partners to learn and fine-tune the processes.”
One end goal has never changed – to reach new retailers for additional points of purchase. These greenfield opportunities are another holy grail for lotteries. They may include even more convenience and grocery stores, those that so far have been wary of lottery, but there’s the potential for so much more, including non-traditional retailers. Bradshaw says it all: “We’re getting creative about how we can leverage these developments to expand lottery presence and not limiting ourselves to certain types of stores.”
