The comparison website is a phenomenon of the internet age which, for many years, has been changing the way people shop online. In an age when fast, easily accesible and reliable information is in such high demand, the idea of being able to visit just one site to compare a mass of companies was, and still is, very popular.
This is not more apparent than in the car insurance market where people would, in the past, have had to spend hours searching sites or even calling around to get the best deal. The question of the reliability and validity of car insurance comparison sites really doing all that they claim first arose when Direct Line began to promote the fact that they would not have any of their products on comparison sites. Surely this is an open admission that they are not competetive enough to be pitted against the rest of the market!
However, when the likes of Aviva, Virgin Money and InsureAndGo also joined the ranks, people began asking questions about why so many mainstream insurers did not want to be present on a seemingly perfect system. The answer lay in the real motives of comparison sites, or perhaps more importantly the ownership of each.
One of the leading Price comparison sites available is actually owned by a bank which also owns two mainstream insurers, another is owned by an insurer outright, and many others have affiliations with insurance companies. Information of course that they fail to mention anywhere visible on their sites. As profit-making companies they will always be looking at the bottom line, what suits them best. If this is to conflict with the best interests of any given searcher, you can be sure of which way they will go.
It appears that the companies which refuse to be on comparison sites do not want to have their competitors promoting their deals or rather showing showing competing products in a less than objective manner.
This makes it very important to step outside of the Price comparison site realm when shopping around for a new deal. Not only will it give consumers a better picture of the market but it will eventually forcé the comparison sites to be a little more transparent. There will be a number of cases when particular details of a driver wanting to be insured will yield the best cover from one of the four mentioned above but if their sites are not accessed individually, people will be none the wiser.
An equally common and sensible approach which people are beginning to use now is to compare these comparison sites against each other. As none of them show a full picture of the market and between them have many overlaps, doing a comparison of each, along with that of the independent insurers, will give the real picture as to the best deals out there.