Main concerns with Price Comparison sites

They are not always easy to use: They are supposed to make our lives easier but many consumers find them really confusing and don’t trust them to find the best deal. In a customer satisfaction survey on price comparison sites conducted by Which?, no single website scored any more than 50%. Webcredible has also identified some usability flaws these sites could improve on. In particular they highlighted that the results pages of many of the sites could be further clarified and greater control regarding the presentation of the results should be passed over to the user. Yet even so more than half the people surveyed had used a price comparison site in the last year, helping the largest sites pocket annual revenues of well over £170 million.

Consumers must pay attention to detail: Although online comparison shopping may allow consumers to compare deals quickly, this speed and convenience can sometimes result in poor attention to detail. For instance by opting for the cheapest insurance price, you need to be absolutely clear on what the deal covers. The cheapest price will not always reflect quality therefore consumers need to understand what they are actually getting for their money.

Pricing information might not always be up to date: A further concern raised by InvisibleHand is that the prices stated might not always be reliable as these sites depend upon the retailers to update their price data meaning that many can be up to a week out of date. Consumers can be lured in by what they think looks like a good deal but they are left disappointed after clicking through and discovering that the real price is completely different.

No site covers the entire market: Research firm Defaqto identifies that no site covers the entire market meaning that the cheapest quote listed may be more expensive than an another site’s cheapest quote. This casts doubts over whether consumers are actually comparing like with like, so people rightly worry about the sites not being comprehensive or competitive enough. In the Which? survey it was also revealed that one in four people chose not go on to buy through these sites because they had been able to find a cheaper quote themselves elsewhere.

What is in it for them?

It is important to be aware that most price comparison sites have commercial arrangements with the companies featuring on their site, thus questioning their overall credibility to an extent. Some sites have a commission fee payable when someone buys through the site and others receive a click through payment every time a consumer clicks from a price comparison site through to a company’s own website. In the survey conducted by Which? more than two thirds of the respondents revealed that they think the sites will just list the products that bring in the most commission and only 30% trust them to find the best price available.

Most Popular Sites

In the survey conducted by Which? the two most popular price comparison sites offering a vast range of deals where identified as Moneysupermarket (used by 36% in the last year) and Confused.com (30%).  Additional frequently used sites include GoCompare (16%), Comparethemarket (14%), uSwitch (11%), TescoCompare (6%) and Moneyextra (3%).   Impact Media have also more recently suggested that Google appear to have cornered another market; with 17.9 million users in the US now using Google product search each year and they are now fast becoming the leaders in shopping comparison services.

Can they be trusted?

In a virtual world where choice is almost limitless, online shopping price comparison websites are a great user friendly tool and provide a good starting point for consumers wanting to check out the various deals available. Consumers must be aware of the concerns with these sites and never just visit one site. If you are careful and look into the finer details of the deals available, there are a number of significant savings out there to take advantage of!

Can Price Comparison websites be trusted? is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.

Submitting your products range to the  search system is the only way to list your products alongside your rivals in Googles product market place.

Why use it?

The reason why I would recommend it as a good place to start is that its free and contains good feedback and help on managing your feed in the form of the Google base centre http://www.google.co.uk/base.  The feed is also relatively easy to produce providing you have your products in a database on your current website. Sending your product feed to a range of other price comparison sites is done in a very similar manner and once you crack it with Google its more about just tailoring the category names of your feed to suit the requirements set out by the other providers.

Google accepts the feed in range of different formats. You can export your database to an xml feed or make a copy of it into a csv file, both of which Google accepts. You can also manually add the products into the Google Base area if you have a very small product range that is manageable enough in this way. With some basic tracking added on and a small set up in analytics you can start to track its use after 24 hours. The difficulty with making the feed work is getting your products ranking highly enough to get views and clicks (same as with search engine optimisation). This is something we can help you with so please feel free to contact us and we can help you through the whole process from setting up your feed to get your products appearing at the top of the product search listings.

What is it?

As you can see in the screen grab below the product search area looks similar to the Google search screen but with the results all being products related to the keyword term entered as opposed to websites. The listing shows basic information about the product and shows the image that you have supplied.

Clicking the product title then takes you straight to the product details page of the supplier’s website. There is no intermediate page so this page is the only chance to get enough detail across in order to convince the customer to click on your link as opposed to the competitions.

How can you get noticed in the listings?

A search for the term “modern warfare 2” in the Google shopping area,  it brings back a range of products that Google has deemed relevant to that title and there are a lot of them (2,829). Google encourage you to submit a lot of categories of information around the product even though only a few are actually displayed (title, image, description, price and condition). Obviously providing as much detail as possible will help your position as Google will promote you higher for queries specific to any of this data. So for example if someone types in “large red Berghaus jacket” for example and a supplier has put in their feed that a particular Berghaus jacket is available in those options it will be more likely to appear than someone who hasn’t.

There are a number of factors that affect the position and rankings of your products in the feeds and also you need to be mindful of what keywords will get people to your products and what keywords are commonly searched for. We can help you understand and develop your shopping feed strategy so you appear top of the listings and get in front of the most traffic available.

The main point to note is the standard view is based on relevance but the customer can and will often filter the results (most likely on price).  There is not much you can do here but be as price competitive as possible. You can see here that the delivery rate is not shown on the feed but just the product price. This is not to say that by having a high delivery cost and a low product price you will rake in the orders, you will get lots of clicks on your product if its the same as the competition but at a lower price but if you suddenly drop a high delivery cost on them at the checkout stage they will hit there back button and return to the product feed page and shop again.

As often talked discussed, customers in today’s online shopping climate are looking for free or cheap delivery on everything so you need to strike a balance between getting this right and not making your product price too expensive. Obviously if you can afford to be the cheapest and offer free delivery then your product is going to kill the competition and you need to get on every price comparison site out there.

Some other reasons to be on Google Product Search!

It is worth noting that you get the benefit of appearing in the natural search listings as well on occasion if your product is in the top few positions of the feed. Google will often deem it relevant to post some of the products related to the term in the normal search results if the user puts in something like “buy modern warfare 2” for example:

As previously mentioned if your new to the world of listing on comparison shopping sites its a good place to start and setting up a Google feed will give you a template for getting your products onto other sites much more quickly.

Finally the feed gives another chance to get your company name out there. Even if people don’t click on your items but constantly see your name you will receive positive brand exposure over time that certainly wont harm your business providing the reason there not clicking is simply because your products are too expensive and that’s what they remember you for.

Google Product Search is a post from WMpS, your one stop digital agency.