Go to a fair and you will find at least one stand running a free spinner on an iPad. It looks great. The colours are loud, the tick-tick-tick pulls heads round, and there is a small crowd.
Then watch what happens after the wheel stops. The rep hands over a keyring, the visitor says thank you, and both of them walk away. Nothing was captured. The booth just paid for a prize and bought a smile.
That is the whole comparison in one scene, and it is not a knock on the spinner. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.
Free spinners are display tools, not capture tools
Wheel of Names and the free spinner apps that follow it are built for one job: put a list of entries on a screen and pick one at random, visibly and fairly. They are good at it. They cost nothing, they load in a browser, and you can usually have one running in a couple of minutes.
What they do not do is collect anything. The entries come from you — you type them in, or paste them from a list you already have. The spinner has no idea who is standing in front of it, and no way to ask. When the event ends, you have a browser tab.
For a classroom picking a reader, a team standup picking who demos, a church raffle, an internal draw at the Christmas party — that is perfect. The entrants are already known. There is nothing to capture. Paying anything for that would be silly.
At a booth, the entrants are the entire point, and they are strangers.
Who is holding the phone
This is the structural difference and everything else follows from it.
A free spinner runs on your screen. The visitor stands and watches. Your rep taps spin. That means the interaction is one-to-one and physically bounded by your one device, and it means the visitor's details only exist if somebody writes them down separately — usually on a clipboard beside the tablet, which puts you back in the paper forms problem with an extra step.
Trade Shop runs on their screen. The visitor scans a QR code on the fascia, fills in their details in their own phone browser with no app to install, and the wheel spins in their hand. Their record exists before the wheel moves. That inversion is not a small design preference — it is the difference between a game and a lead capture system.
The spinner asks who should win. The booth needs to know who showed up. Those are not the same question.
The queue problem
One wheel serves one person at a time. If your spinner lives on your tablet, your throughput is capped at however long a spin plus a handover takes, times one.
Trade Show PRO's 2026 round-up puts the average attendee at five to eight minutes in a booth. Spend three of those queuing to touch a tablet and you have very little left for the conversation you actually came for. And a queue is only an asset up to a point — past four or five people, the sixth walks.
When the wheel lives on every visitor's own phone, six people can spin at once. The rep is freed up to talk to the two who look like buyers instead of running the game. That is the same principle behind good booth staffing: the staff should be selling, not operating the attraction.
Prize limits, probability and the day-one problem
Free spinners are built around a list of entries rather than a stock of prizes, so what you can control is what is on the list. What they are not built to do is manage prize stock across a ten-day fair.
Here is the failure everyone learns the hard way. You put the good prize on the wheel — say a hamper worth ₦50,000 — and it goes out at 10:20am on day one to the third person who walks past. You now have nine and a half days of wheel with nothing worth winning on it, and a segment you have to quietly stop honouring.
Trade Shop handles this as rules rather than vigilance. You set prize limits — how many of each prize can leave, full stop — and controlled probabilities, so the big item is genuinely rare rather than nominally rare. Our prize wheel design guide goes into what to actually put on the segments so you attract buyers rather than freebie hunters.
Branding, and what you keep afterwards
A free spinner shows a generic wheel with your prize names typed on it. That is fine. Nobody visits a fair to admire a colour scheme.
But it does mean the most photographed, most watched object on your stand carries somebody else's product design and, on some tools, somebody else's URL. Trade Shop is a branded experience — your wheel, your prizes, on a page that belongs to your campaign.
The bigger gap is afterwards. A free spinner leaves you with nothing: no participant list, no spin outcomes, no count of how many people engaged, no record of which prize went where. Trade Shop's dashboard keeps lead records, spin outcomes and campaign history across active, completed and draft campaigns, and you can export the participant records. That is what you take to the Monday meeting, and what your reps call from.
| Free spinner app | Trade Shop | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | from ₦10,000 for up to 3 days |
| Whose device | Yours — visitor watches | Theirs — visitor's own phone browser |
| Details captured | None | Captured before the wheel spins |
| App install | None | None |
| Prize stock limits | Not designed for it | Prize limits per prize |
| Probability control | Basic weighting at best | Controlled probabilities |
| Branding | Generic wheel | Your branded experience |
| Throughput | One person at a time | Everyone spins at once |
| Record after the event | A browser tab | Dashboard, spin outcomes, exportable participants |
| Consent capture | None | No dedicated marketing-consent field |
| Works offline | No | No |
| Best for | Classroom picks, internal raffles, team draws | Booth traffic you need to turn into a list |
When a free spinner is the right answer
Genuinely often. If you are picking a winner from a list you already own — newsletter subscribers, past customers, everyone who filled a form last week — there is no capture problem to solve and a free spinner does the job perfectly.
Same for internal use: a staff draw, a team game, a school event, a workshop icebreaker. And same for a booth where the visitors are already registered by the organiser and you get the list anyway.
The moment to pay for something is when the people spinning are strangers whose details you do not have and will not otherwise get. That is a fair floor, and that is the only case Trade Shop is built for.
Frequently asked questions
Does Wheel of Names collect entrant details?
No. Free spinners take a list you already have and pick from it. If you want the details of the person spinning, you have to capture them separately, which usually means a clipboard next to the tablet.
Can I use a free spinner for lead capture at a trade show?
You can use it as the attraction, but the capture has to happen somewhere else — a paper form or a separate digital form. That split is what most booths get wrong, because the visitor spins, wins and leaves before anyone asks for a number.
How do I stop the best prize going in the first hour?
Set a hard limit on how many of that prize can be won and lower its probability. Trade Shop does both as campaign rules rather than relying on your rep remembering to edit the wheel.
Is Trade Shop just a spin the wheel app?
No — the wheel is the incentive, not the product. Details are captured before the spin, and what you keep afterwards is a dashboard of leads and spin outcomes plus exportable participant records.
Put the wheel in their hands, not yours
If your spinner is currently living on your tablet, you are running an attraction without a capture step. Move it to the visitor's phone, put the form in front of the spin, and leave the fair with the list. Launch a campaign — from ₦10,000 for up to 3 days, plus ₦1,000 per extra day.
Sources: Trade Show PRO — Trade Show Statistics 2026: 50+ Data Points Every Exhibitor Should Know