Comparison Websites, Who Needs Them
We’ve all seen the adverts, whether it’s an opera singer dancing around a coffee shop, or just Peter Jones walking around a multi-storey supermarket, the adverts for price comparison websites just get worse and worse (apart from Compare The Market advert with the meerkats).
We first saw price comparison sites coming to the TV a couple of years ago, back then they only really dealed with car insurance. However, now that these companies are discovering how lazy UK citizens really are, they are branching out to offer anything and everything, even business insurance.
Even though these sites can save you a little bit of time while you’re surfing the net for everything from debit cards salon insurance, as you don’t have to fill out the same form more than one, but really, are these sites needed? Once you’ve finished the form, you get a long list of companies offering their services, however, most customers simply dismiss the majority of the list because they’ve never heard of the company. No doubt one of these companies actually belong to the website themselves.
After you’ve chosen which deal you think is saving you the most money, you can then buy it via the comparison site, but, how can you tell you’re getting the best possible deal? You’ll find a number of insurance companies advertising on TV, such as Direct Line, that aren’t listing themselves on price comparison sites.
You might be thinking, why would they bother avoiding the comparison sites, there can’t be any benefits for them. However, because these price comparison sites charge a commision to the companies listed, Direct Line doesn’t need to pay this fee, this means that more savings can be passed onto the customer, you.
This means, if you are dedicated to finding the lowest possible price 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 if you think about it, the sites themselves are just as pointless as their TV ads.
