Future comparisons:

What's next for price

comparison websites?
August 2009
 User experience research & design

Contents

Executive summary.................................................................................................................... 3

Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 4

Price comparison history............................................................................................................ 5

Current market ........................................................................................................................... 6

Results page..................................................................................................................... 7

Trust ............................................................................................................................... 10

Brand recognition and returning customers.................................................................... 12

Other useful features ...................................................................................................... 13

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 16

References .............................................................................................................................. 17

About Webcredible .................................................................................................................. 18

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 User experience research & design

Executive summary

This report examines the changing markets that price comparison sites have faced and
continue to face. It looks at past trends and how the comparison site market currently stands.

Key findings of the report are:

 There are gaps in leading comparisons sites’ user experience offering, with many sites
needing to improve their presentation of results and control over how the results are
presented and manipulated

 There is a lack of functionality to support collaborative decision processes

 There are minimal attempts to tackle trust issues held by many consumers

 Interesting functionality is presented on a number of price comparison sites, that can

help retain awareness of the brand through encouraging regular use

 Comparison sites will have to approach their user experiences with far more rigour,
supporting user behaviours to encourage greater brand awareness and loyalty.

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 User experience research & design

Introduction

Price comparison sites are big business. In August 2008 Money Supermarket saw 6-month
profits up 113% to £14.4m and visitors up 39% to 62 million1. However, 1 year later they’re
suffering with visitor numbers falling by a third over 4 months2. Multi-million pound advertising
budgets are spent to push each brand into the ever more crowded market.

The products they compare cover the whole range of consumer financial services such as
insurance, mortgages and credit cards. As a result of this range, it's crucial that the user
experience produced by using comparison sites is clear, simple and complete.

The report will examine the leading financial comparison sites’ user experience, looking at key
deliverables such as:

 The results page

 Overall trust

 Brand recognition

The sites we looked at include:

 ComparetheMarket.com

 Confused.com

 GoCompare.com

 MoneySupermarket.com

 uSwitch.com

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 User experience research & design

Price comparison history

Price comparison sites in Europe are 10 years old. In 1999, 2 sites were set up that have
managed to weather the changing fortunes of the price comparison market –
MoneySupermarket.com and Kelkoo.fr. MoneySupermarket.com was set up providing
mortgage information, before quickly expanding to credit cards and personal loans. It has had
a history of expansion with InsureSupermarket.com and TravelSupermarket.com being set up
soon after in 2000.

Kelkoo.fr covered retail products – still its specialism. Over the last 10 years it has expended
to cover 10 countries and 20 different product categories. It’s not been plain sailing though – it
was bought by Yahoo! in 2004 for €450 million, before being sold in 2008 for €100 million.

Presentation of results
Times have changed significantly since 1999. The technology behind price comparison sites
has developed to the nth degree. Originally acting as online classifieds, they started to draw
from sites’ data feeds published online by the selling sites, detailing the product and its cost.
Nowadays comparison sites are able to trawl sites, drawing the cost of products from the
relevant sites, live, giving the sites much greater control over what and how to present to
users.

Price comparison sites also now have more and more competitors and a much larger range of
offerings. All sites offer a range of product categories, either several types of insurance and
financial products or a range of different physical product categories e.g. clothes, electricals,
books etc.

According to the BBC, as of December 2008 the comparison site market was reported to be
worth more than £1bn a year, with more than 6 million people visiting price comparison sites
every month3. But there was a turning tide accompanying this uplift. As early as August 2008
Moneysupermarket.com was aware a downturn was heading its way1.

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 User experience research & design

Current market

Recently price comparison sites have been suffering. According to Which, between the
months of January and April this year MoneySupermarket.com, GoCompare.com and
Confused.com saw an average fall of 30% in their visitor numbers2:

Fall in visitor numbers (000s) to comparison sites since January 2009

4000

3500

3000

2500

2000 Moneysupermarket.com
Gocompare.com
1500 Confused.com

1000

500

0
Jan-09 Feb-09 Mar-09 Apr-09

There has certainly been a drop in comparison site popularity, something that may have led to
uSwitch.com being put up for sale4. Some insurance suppliers (e.g. Direct Line) have even
taken a clear stance against price comparison sites5.

Sites are now looking for strategic partnerships to extend their reach (and have been for some
time now). The Daily Mail6 and Irish Times7 websites have started offering comparison
services (in partnership with BeatThatQuote.com and Chill.ie respectively):

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 User experience research & design

With a more crowded market it will be harder and harder to differentiate one brand from
another. Other sites with regular visitors such as newspaper sites have the added advantage
of a captive audience – unlike traditional price comparison sites, which rely on visitors coming
in from a search engine and landing on a price comparison site before the comparison
process can be started.

In order to survive this change in fortunes, price comparison sites need to focus on their
delivery. Confused.com recently marketed itself as being really easy to use8. But how easy
are all the major players’ sites to use?

Results page
In May 2008 the FSA conducted an analysis of price comparison sites9 and concluded that the
sites should:

 Highlight any assumptions made (and ensure they’re fair)

 Highlight where products being compared have different features

 Ensure information is up-to-date and presented in a consistent manner

 Ensure firms don’t give a misleading impression of their market coverage

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 User experience research & design

The first 2 of these key guidelines are reliant on the usability of the results page.

The results page is arguably the most important page for a price comparison website. It’s
where the most important interaction occurs – choosing between the available products. In
order for people to be able to do this they need 2 things from the page – clear information and
the ability to control and adjust the results as they wish. The most common way to do this is
through powerful sorting and filtering.

Presentation of results

Let’s look at how the sites present the different information in the results:

MoneySupermarket.com

4 of the 5 sites attempt to present the information in columns with ticks, crosses and a small
amount of text where needed.

uSwitch.com

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 User experience research & design

uSwitch.com takes an alternative approach – placing very little information about each product
on the results page. Users are forced to click into the information page for each product to see
if it’s suitable. This is unlikely to be popular for users (especially those with a slow Internet
connection) and may encourage people to try out other sites instead.

Controlling the results

There’s more variety in how much control price comparison sites give to users over the
presentation of their results.

GoCompare.com (see left) offers

users the ability to define the
different additional cover areas they
need (courtesy car, legal
assistance, etc). Each product is
given a star rating according to how
well each product matches your
requirements.

However this functionality is

essentially a poor filter – it retains
the products in which users have
clearly stated they’re not interested.

Also, the star rating is traditionally

used to represent user reviews so
this is likely to confuse users.

MoneySupermarket.com fares even

worse, with no filter/sort
functionality at all. This places a
large cognitive workload on users
to remember the different products
from a long list that fulfils their
requirements.

Confused.com, ComparetheMarket.com and uSwitch.com all offer filtering functionality:

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 User experience research & design

uSwitch.com

ComparetheMarket.com

Care must be taken that the filters available to users cover the
entire range of filter options that they need. Each site offers
different filters options:

 Confused.com (see right) and ComparetheMarket.com offer

filters giving users the ability to change the voluntary excess
and cover type

 Confused.com and uSwitch.com offer a courtesy car filter

There isn’t any uniformity between the filters that the different sites
offer. This could be a key differentiator between the different price
comparison sites – if one offers the filters that users actually need
to display the results relevant to them then they’ll naturally gravitate
towards that site. The effort needed to sort through its results will
just be lower.

Trust
As a by-product of their age, more and more users are beginning to
understand the price comparison site model. Many have had poor
experiences and no longer trust them10 – “I've never actually
managed to get the price quoted by the comparison site as when I click through to the
provider I’ve always found it be to more”. On top of that, consumer watchdogs now advise you
to visit several before making a decision11.

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 User experience research & design

How price comparison sites work

With poor brand perception comes lower trust, meaning sites will have to work harder to win
user confidence. A good way to help win trust is to explain how the price comparison site
works. With this greater understanding, web users will likely be more forgiving when the user
experience falls over due to an external problem (such as a difference between the quote
prices on the results and when on the insurance site itself).

Currently none of the 5 sites tackle this well. No mention is made on how they’ll find the best
product for you (i.e. what their business model is) nor is there a brief overview of what they do
in the background.

Going off-site

Many users receive a bad experience after going off the price comparison site – the main
complaint of price comparison sites is that people are unable to find the same price quoted on
the comparison site when they go through to the insurance site. This affects perception of the
comparison site and should be prevented where possible.

MoneySupermarket.com highlights why you may get a different quote when moving through
from the comparison site to the insurance site and gives some advice on how to get closer to
the original:

This will increase understanding and help the users recover from a potentially relationship-
ending problem and hopefully increase trust.

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 User experience research & design

Brand recognition and returning customers

Brand recognition and loyalty is the 'Holy Grail' for price comparison sites. Currently there’s
little to no loyalty. The majority of visitors use MoneySupermarket.com one week, then
Confused.com the next. The problem being that people don’t remember the comparison site
they used – instead, they remember the company they eventually purchase from.

Lack of brand recognition

With little brand loyalty, price comparison sites have 2 main ways to get users to visit their
sites:

 Having users enter their sites through search engines (through natural or paid listings)

 Getting users to remember their brand by spending large amounts on advertising

Attempting to get to the top of search listings is tough at the best of times but with other sites
also fighting for the top spot, sites can step over the mark. In early 2008 GoCompare.com was
blacklisted by Google under the search term “car insurance”. In about 2 weeks it saw its
market share of traffic fall from around 17% to 2.3%12.

This explains the sheer volume of advertising for price comparison sites. There’s currently no
other way to ensure people keep coming to your site. However people are losing the key
message – as many adverts aren’t particularly memorable. The new advertising campaign for
ComparetheMarket.com has been successful as it really focuses on brand recognition13.

Basically, these sites need to find other ways to get customers or to increase brand loyalty.
Potential methods include looking for strategic partners (such as a newspaper site) and
attempting to generate more trust with users.

Returning customers and supporting their decision making behaviour

Choosing credit cards, insurance and other important financial decisions are often not decided
in one sitting by one person, but are often joint decisions between partners over several
sessions. These sites must support a broken decision making process – people will need to
break off for a whole series of reasons and/or refer to others who may not be present at the
time of the initial visit. Sites need to offer users the ability to return to their results later, and
even to forward them onto others:

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 User experience research & design

ComparetheMarket.com, GoCompare.com and Confused.com place controls on the page for

users to save their results. All the sites send emails with links back to the results, but this isn’t
made explicit. If users are on the results page they won’t necessarily know that their results
can be restored from their Inbox. Users will be reassured if these ‘save’ controls are present
on the page.

Both ComparetheMarket.com and GoCompare.com also offer users the ability to send the
results on to others. This further supports those people making joint decisions.

One area of delivery we were unable to look at during this review is the long term support for
return customers. As insurance renewals occur yearly, sites should send email reminders 11
months after the initial search. These could link to new search results with the same
information entered previously (same address, car etc.), with the ability to edit as necessary.
This will increase the likelihood of users using the comparison site again, as the effort of
entering their details is skipped (or at least reduced).

Other useful features

The following are examples of good functionally used by various price comparison sites for
physical objects, such as TVs or phones.

Getting to know selling sites

One aspect of using price comparison sites is

encountering a number of unknown sellers. Many of the
smaller sellers appear prominently in price comparison
sites as they attempt to make customers aware of their
brand. Buyers may be reluctant to purchase from brands
they don’t recognise, and so will miss out on the
advantages price comparison sites offer. Sites must find
ways to enable users to learn about the different sellers
to enable them to make their purchase decision.

Streetprices.com offers a seller rating option (see left).

This feature can help ease users’ worries about the

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 User experience research & design

smaller, unknown sellers.

The lurking shopper

Many people consider making a purchase for a

while – and never get round to it. They visit the
product page/search a couple of times – lurk on
the page, before never returning. Price
comparison sites are attempting to combat this
by encouraging these ‘lurkers’ to make a
purchase.

Streetprices.com also offers the option of price

alerts (see right) – where you can define the
price you’re looking for, and the quality of the
seller. An email is sent when one seller drops
its prices past the limit.

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 User experience research & design

Price Spider.com UK offers a price tracking graph to see the change in prices over time (see
above). This functionality could however put potential customers off when they might
otherwise make a purchase. However this will encourage potential customers to later return to
the comparison site (for this and potentially other purchases) to ensure they’re getting the best
deal.

Making the comparison site a research hub

As well as supporting purchases, price comparison sites can build brand loyalty by
encouraging people to return even when not buying. This can be done in a variety of ways,
but PriceSpider.com UK uses a very elegant method (see below).

Price Spider.com UK pulls reviews from other sites. This is a great idea, as people often like
to have access to as many reviews as possible when making a purchase decision.
Amalgamating several reviews from different sites reduces the number of sites browsers must
visit, and makes the site useful to browsers as well as buyers.

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 User experience research & design

Conclusion

Price comparison sites are being squeezed during the recession, right when they should be
best placed to take advantage of the new, price-conscious age.

The future of price comparison sites in the long-term looks good but they must ensure the
sites are simple and easy to use. There are key usability features that the big players could
and should improve upon.

The results pages of many of the sites could be clarified, and much greater control over the
presentation of the results should be passed over to the user, through filter and sort
functionality. Sites should also attempt to design in more functionality that supports the
collaborative approach many people take to choosing financial products.

This collaborative functionality will no doubt become a further core part of the price
comparison sites’ offerings – including shared searches and company and product reviews.

Trust is becoming a more important issue than in the past and price comparison sites as a
group must work on building greater trust from users through transparent practices and
support once users go off-site.

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 User experience research & design

References

1. Marketing Week, Moneysupermarket profits rise 113% but warns of slowdown, 27 August 2008 -
www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/moneysupermarket-profits-rise-113-but-warns-of-
slowdown/2062153.article

2. Which, Comparison websites compared - www.which.co.uk/advice/price-comparison-

sites/comparison-websites-compared/index.jsp

3. BBC News Online, Price comparison sites: deal or no deal?, 5 December 2008 -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7766798.stm

4. Marketing Week, uSwitch up for sale, 10 June 2009 - www.marketingweek.co.uk/uswitch-up-for-

sale/3001286.article

5. Marketing Week, Direct Line relaunches red phone and mouse icons, 5 January 2009 -
www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/direct-line-relaunches-red-phone-and-mouse-
icons/2063798.article

6. Marketing Week , Mail Online expands into price-comparison market, 11 June 2009 -
www.marketingweek.co.uk/mail-online-expands-into-price-comparison-market/3001322.article

7. RTE Business, Irish Times takes uchoose.ie stake, 27 July 2009 -

www.rte.ie/business/2009/0727/irishtimes.html

8. Dusted Design Blog, Not so Confused.com, 21 January 2009 -

www.dusteddesign.com/blog/new-confused-dot-com-focussed-on-usability/

9. FSA, Review into general insurance comparison websites, May 2008 -

www.fsa.gov.uk/pages/Doing/Regulated/Promo/thematic/review_gi_comparison.shtml

10. BBC News Online, Have your say: Comparison websites, 17 July 2009 -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/moneybox/8156955.stm

11. Which, Is the price right? - www.which.co.uk/advice/price-comparison-sites/is-the-price-

right/index.jsp

12. Hitwise, What happens if your site gets 'blacklisted' by Google?, 13 February 2008 -
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/02/google_blacklists_gocompare.html

13. Marketing Week, Comparethemarket.com launches spoof website campaign, 5 January 2009 -
www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/comparethemarketcom-launches-spoof-website-
campaign/2063804.article

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 User experience research & design

About Webcredible

Webcredible is a user experience consultancy, offering a range of usability, accessibility &

design services based around your specific requirements:

User-centred design User research

 Information architecture  Usability testing
 Interaction design  Interviews & focus groups
Web development & audits  Persona creation
 Accessible CSS web design Training & mentoring
 Accessible content  Usability, IA & web writing
management system
 Accessibility & CSS
 Accessibility audits
 Ongoing support & mentoring

Webcredible is widely regarded as one of the most innovative and respected user experience
consultancies in the UK. Our 150+ research articles and white papers have been re-published
on 100s of websites and we receive 150,000 visitors to our website each month.

We are:

 Focused on client needs – Our aims are to optimise conversion rates for companies
and ensure public sector organisations effectively disseminate information.

 Passionate – The team here at Webcredible loves what they do and we only recruit
staff passionate about usability and accessibility.

 Approachable – We’re friendly and jargon-free. Consultants, despite being highly

educated and experienced, only communicate in a user-friendly manner.

Clients include Asda, BBC, eBay, EDF Energy, IPC Media, Lloyds TSB, Sony, St John
Ambulance, T-Mobile and World Health Organization.

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