Financial comparison sites panned by Which?
Published: 18 November 2009
By MoneyHighStreet Staff 1 Comment
Updated: 18 November 2009
Financial comparison sites are not delivering a good service to their customers, according to a new survey by Which? Money.
Which? Money has conducted a customer satisfaction survey into financial comparison web sites and found that no site scored more than 50%.
Lack of trust in comparison sites was voiced by 70% of Which? members and two thirds of those questioned thought that they would only be presented with products that make the most commission for the web sites.
A quarter of people said they did not buy through a comparison site because they found a cheaper quote elsewhere and 12 per cent said they were unhappy with the quotes they were given.
Even after searching for products on comparison sites, more than half said they bought the product directly from the provider.
“We found that using financial comparison sites is clearly not a happy experience for many – all the sites in our survey got low customer scores.”, said James Daley, Editor of Which? Money.
“If you’re shopping around for a good deal, it makes sense to go to more than one site and be aware that some companies aren’t featured. Watch out for things like voluntary excess, and make sure the policy you’re offered is what you actually want.”, he added.
Confused.com, one of the sites mentioned in the study, has responded to this study by emphasising that Which? Money had congratulated Confused.com earlier this year on its market leading position.
Carlton Hood, CEO of Confused.com pointed out that “Fifty per cent of all motor insurance policies are now sold via comparison sites; so there are a large number of people who are confident to use these sites in order to save money.”
So there’s a battle afoot in the comparison market – see our blog on ‘The battle of the financial comparison web sites‘ for our views and, amongst others, that of GoCompare who suggest there may be more to the Which? findings than initially meets the eye.
I find this hard to believe. I’ve been using comparison sites since their inception many years ago, and have save loads of money on Insurance, Mortgages, Electrical Goods, Energy suppliers etc. I have used moneysupermarket.com and pricerunner.co.uk, and have always found the prices listed there cheaper than anywhere on the high st, and any other websites I’ve looked at. I do not used confused.com as it is owned by Admiral Insurance, and I do not trust that their prices will unbiased towards their own products.
It is only recently that new wannabe comparison sites like gocompare, tescocompare, comparethemarket (annoying meerkats) etc have come on board things have got worse. Many high st stores, and insurance companies are making losses due to more people being frugal with their money and using comparison sites to look for the best price. I think Which? is also losing fans and subscriptions due to the comparison sites.