Compare comparison sites

Price comparison websites, while useful, are very much in frontier country when it comes to the Irish market, writes CONOR POPE

SHOPPING AROUND is getting easier and the days when canny consumers had to spend hours each week walking or driving from supermarket to supermarket scouring the shelves for the cheapest deals are fading into memory.

The last year has seen a raft of Irish companies and individuals using the web to offer regularly updated information on better value financial products, electrical goods and supermarket deals. We have cheap eats, savvy shoppers, deal hunters, bargain alerts and quote clubs all claiming to take the hassle out of finding the best value for money.

The question is: what took us so long. Online comparison services are two-a-penny across the EU where hundreds of websites, blogs and twitter feeds have been directing people towards better value for nearly 10 years. A meerkat conjured up by comparethemarket.com, the British insurance website, has won himself over half a million Facebook friends and 25,000 followers on twitter in recent months and his popularity has forced his company’s rivals, notably moneysupermarket.com and confused.com, to rethink their strategies to stop the flow of traffic from their sites.

While none of the Irish websites offering financial price comparisons have come even close to capturing the public imagination to the same degree as the meerkat, some are working very hard to grow their businesses with Compare Ireland (www.compareireland.ie), the Quote Club (www.quoteclub.ie) and www.uchoose.ie (which The Irish Times part owns) just three which are hoping to convert web traffic into cash.

In Britain, price comparison services have started to attract the attention of the Office of Fair Trade which recently questioned the transparency of the relationship that exists between some websites and the companies featured on their sites. The question the British authorities believe consumers should be asking is how the websites hope to profit from their users? Do companies get paid by suppliers for positioning them prominently on their site or do they earn commission for the business generated through the site? Or do they rely exclusively on advertising revenue?

One of the most useful areas where price comparison websites have thrived in the UK covers the complex world of insurance – users fill in forms on a single website and the information is sent to all the companies who then pitch – virtually – for the business.

There are no insurance price comparison websites operating in this State which cover the entire market. According to industry insiders, the insurance companies are happy with the status quo as it allows them to retain control of their pricing and how it is presented to consumers. Some, industry sources say, have done their level best to dissuade the big players in the UK market from setting up in this State.

Insurance companies have many distribution channels for their various products and have different levels of pricing for each product, depending on the channel. Many sell through offices, call centres, websites, brokers’ offices, supermarkets and banks, so quotes from all six will differ because the insurance companies do different deals with different brokers based on the nature of the relationship and on the volume of business they bring in.

While a degree of opacity exists in the financial markets, price comparisons can be a lot more straightforward when it comes to groceries. This summer the National Consumer Agency (NCA) wrote to the Republic’s big retailers to sound them out on the establishment of a grocery database containing real-time price information which consumers could use to make accurate comparisons on the cost of a basket of goods.

The NCA wants consumers to have more timely information on supermarket pricing than the costly biannual surveys it publishes. It wrote to Tesco, Spar, Dunnes Stores, Superquinn, Supervalu, Aldi and Lidl and, while nothing has happened yet, a spokeswoman for the NCA told Price Watch last week that dialogue was ongoing between it and the retailers and the project was “still very much on the cards”.

With things moving slowly at an official level, other people with their eye on prices have stepped up. One of the most popular and well regarded sites with an interest in prices is Cheap Eats (www.cheapeats.ie), an informal and friendly blog that offers readers recipes and cooking tips as well as pointing out the bargains on offer in various retailers.

Cheap Eats is not alone – www.mydeal.ie covers offers from all the big retailers in the country. Last week, amongst other things, we learned that Tesco was selling 1.5kg bags of potatoes for €1.34 while Maxol garages had two packets of Maltesers for €1. Over at www.bethrifty.ie there’s an entirely different model and one which could take off in a big way. It doesn’t simply point people to good deals, it also operates a cashback system so every time it sends a customer to a website and they buy something, it gets commission which it passes on to its members as cashback.

Twitter is also awash with bargain pointers. Bargain Alerts highlights deals across an apparently indiscriminate range of retailers, covering everything from beer to boxsets. The tweets, mostly, are linked to bargain spots from users of boards.ie. Irish Consumer, meanwhile, has adopted a more egalitarian approach and promises to “give out bargain alerts and consumer tips for Irish consumers. No spam, just deals.”

The newest kid on the block is smartshopper.ie. Formally launched last week, it is a smart looking site that compares prices across the country’s supermarkets and highlights the top offers in-store every week.

It was set up by Fiona Looney (no, not that one), a mother of three, who says she has been ferreting out bargains for years. As the recession took hold late last year she decided to set up the site. “To me it is about saving time and money. I don’t really have the time to go from supermarket to supermarket looking out for the best value.” It plans to charge users €11.99 a year – there is a free trial period – and will check the prices each week on up to 250 products from your shopping list and tell you where the best value is to be found. But is €11.99 good value when so many of her rivals are giving away bargain spots for nothing? “We have to charge for it. The information is valuable. I am paying people to compile it. We need people to pay. We just can’t offer the service for free.”