Best price comparison sitesComparing the comparison sites

Price comparison sites - we compare the market

Price comparison sites are currently bombarding us with ads featuring everything from a Russian meerkat called Aleksandr to a British dragon named Peter Jones. And the marketing seems to be paying off. More than half of our members say they have used a price comparison site in the last year, helping the largest sites chalk up annual revenues of well over £170m.

Levels of cover offered by these sites varied widely

But new Which? research suggests that price comparison sites are not providing their users with a good enough service. In our first ever price comparison site satisfaction survey, no sites scored higher than 50% – with average customer scores coming in lower than any other financial sector we look at. We also found that many of our members don’t trust the sites to find the best deal. Therefore, we’ve turned the spotlight on seven of the biggest price comparison sites to see how easy they are to use, how you use them and what you think of them.

Price comparison sites: the major players

According to our survey, the two most popular sites are Moneysupermarket (used by 36% in the last year) and Confused.com (30%). These are followed by GoCompare (16%), Comparethemarket (14%), Uswitch(11%), TescoCompare (6%) and Moneyextra (3%).

No other price comparison site had been visited by more than 1% of our users. Car insurance was the most popular product searched for (78%), followed by home insurance (49%) and savings accounts (33%). But our research suggests members use comparison sites as one of a number of tools when shopping for financial products, as only around half who searched for insurance went on to buy the product through the website.

Price comparison sites are bombarding our homes with advertising

Which price comparison sites can you trust?

In fact, while members may be willing to use price comparison sites, most still don’t trust them to find the best deal. More than two thirds of respondents think the sites will present the products that make the websites the most commission, and only 30% trust them to find the best price available. A lack of trust was also a key reason among those who chose not to use comparison websites (21%). 

A lot of members seem to doubt the competitiveness of the quotes from the sites. A quarter said they found a cheaper quote elsewhere and 12% that they were unhappy with the quotes they got.

Using comparison websites is clearly not a happy experience for many – and all the sites in our survey got low customer scores. Moneysupermarket came top, but only managed to score 50%. At the bottom was Moneyextra with only 37%.

Members were worried about the sites not being comprehensive or competitive enough, and the difficulty in comparing providers. One member told us: ‘The policies did not cover what I wanted. I was annoyed by the fact they all have different things covered – such as different excesses or legal cover. I want quotes for the same level of cover.’

There was also concern about being pestered as a result of getting quotes. ‘I was repeatedly telephoned by the insurance companies who were in the five cheapest,’ another member told us.

We also found that some sites don’t make it easy for you to opt out of marketing calls and emails (see Comparison sites: your privacy).

Price comparison sites customer satisfaction

The table shows our expert’s assessment of the seven most popular price comparison websites in our member survey, based on quotes we got for car and house insurance during Sept/Oct 2009. Sites were rated good, average or poor on the following: help text, excess, presentation and ease of use.

USING THE TABLE

Help text To get a good rating, the help text needed to give information and advice – for example, tips about how to keep the cost of your premiums down. Excess To get a good rating, a site had to offer you the option of selecting a voluntary excess, not give a default pre-filled answer and separate out voluntary and compulsory excess on the results table. Presentation Ratings based on having a clear font, using no or few default answers, having a logical order of questions and a useful comparison function on the results page. Ease of use Rated by how easy the form was to navigate, including how easy it was to find the marketing opt-out. Number of quotes How many quotes were returned. Customer satisfaction score Based on responses from our online panel survey and created from overall satisfaction and whether the respondent would recommend the site to a friend.

Which? research

We used the following examples to put comparison sites to the test:

Home insurance

We got quotes for £40,000 of contents insurance for a three-bedroom house in a medium-risk area. The house was occupied by two adults, both clerical workers, with no children. It was of standard construction, in a good state of repair and with no history of subsidence or flooding. It had standard security and a smoke alarm but no burglar alarm.

Car insurance

We got quotes for a medium-risk, group-13 car in a high-risk area. The quotes were for a 40-year-old woman, using the car for social purposes only, with an annual mileage of about 12,000 miles. She has held a full licence since she was 17, with no accidents, claims or convictions, and there was nothing unusual about the car.

For independent, expert advice, see our guide to finding a Which? Best Buy car insurance policy.