Do Price Comparison Websites Have A Future?
Published: 12 August 2011 By Chris RayFollow me on Twitter 3 Comments
Our news item about British Gas suspending doorstep selling, and our comments that you should use a price comparison website to find the best energy deals has got me thinking. Do price comparison websites actually have a good future ahead of them?
Straight away, you think “of course they do”. Think about all that expensive TV adverting that companies such as uSwitch and CompareTheMarket.com do. Consumers are flocking to them eager to see how much they will save.
So why am I wondering what will happen to the myriad of price comparison web sites?
The answer is because Google bought BeatThatQuote for a cool £37.7 million in March. There must be a reason why Google would invest so much in one of the less well known price comparison sites.
I believe that reason is because Google wants to be a major provider of price comparisons. It does not want you to use uSwitch, moneysupermarket or the other players in the comparison market.
Google controls around 80% of internet search traffic in the UK, I don’t think it will be long before we see BeatThatQuote at the top of the search rankings and in prominent text advert positions.
When that happens, then the other price comparison sites will struggle to achieve high traffic levels from the Internet. Google will slowly shut off that stream of potential customers, making life difficult for its competitors.
If you are thinking this cannot happen, then look at searches for almost any product. Loh and behold, there is a prominent display of “shopping results” from companies paying Google for that premium listing.
Google has millions of shareholders looking for the company to find ways of increasing its revenue and profits. Revenue from price comparisons will be one of the ways it can do this.
The days of other price comparison websites may well be numbered! What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.
So here ends the objectivity of the google. They are becoming the opposite of their moto “Do not be evil” They have already started with “removing” other price comparison websites from the web. After their “Panda” update, almost all price comparison sites in europe have significantly lost visits from google, which is the main source and starting point of 80%of the searchesand with it their revenues. Some even over 75%. One of the biggest victims is also ciao, which already took legal actions towards google.
I really hope eu commision will do its job here and stop googles actions in this regard and give a strong message,like they did with microsoft and its IE, to all monopol like companies who think they can do everything they like.
Please spread the word and tell public and eu commision to stop the evil doers with such tactics and strategies.
Thank you
Thanks for your comment, RZ.
Yes, the Panda update has hit many price comparison sites badly, probably because they don’t have much in the way of content other than various comparison tables.
This occurs soon after Google purchases a price comparison site of its own. I’m not saying the two events are linked, because Panda was a global change to search positioning whereas of course buying BeatThatQuote is UK specific.
However the two events are bound to put a number of price comparison sites under pressure.
Providing the consumer with as much information as possible will result in saving money when it’s time to purchase. This is the result of the actions of many price comparison sites today. With 40% of households comparing prices before a purchase, price comparison sites are becoming more interested in visitors needs than ever before. Google will always be the frontrunner in this industry along with many more industries….interesting.