Comparison Websites, Who Needs Them

Even if you rarely watch TV, no doubt you have seen one of the aweful adverts from the price comparison websites, whether it’s Peter Jones walking around a glass supermarket, or an opera singer dancing around a coffee shop, the adverts just seem to get worse each time.

The original price comparison sites began advertising on our TVs a few years back, when they generally only dealed with car insurance. However, now time has passed and they’ve discovered that the common UK citizen is very lazy, these websites have opened out into other markets such as credit cards, loans, and even business insurance.

Obviously these sites are useful for some time saving while you’re searching for everything from credit cards to salon insurance, as you don’t have to continuously fill out the same form, but are these sites really needed? After completing the form, you receive a long list of available deals, however, more often than not, most of the list is dismissed by the customer because they’ve cimply never heard of the company. It wouldn’t come as a surprise if some of the companies listed were owned by the price comparison site.

Once you’ve chosen which deal is right for you, you can then purchase it via the comparison site, however, are you really getting the best deal? These days, you’ll find a number of insurance companies, one being Direct Line, are not listing themselves on price comparison sites.

You may think that it’s stupid for those companies to avoid comparison sites, what are they gaining by not. However, due to the price comparison sites charging the companies a commission, Direct Line don’t have to pay this, meaning they can pass more savings onto you as the customer.

This now means that to really find out if you’re getting the best deals for, as an example, office insurance, you have to use both, the sites that don’t list themselves on the price comparison websites, plus the comparison sites themselves. This all means that in the end you will have to fill out more forms, which is what the price comparison sites were trying to avoid in the first place. So in the end, they are pretty much pointless, just like their TV adverts.