3 Things You Need To Know About Car Insurance Comparison Sites

Do you remember a time when receiving your car insurance renewal notice meant that you had to set aside a day for ringing round various insurers, or taking a trip to your local insurance broker, to try to find cheap car insurance? Maybe not.

Someone got a good deal on their car insurance...

Us young'lings are so used now to hopping onto the internet to find car insurance quotes. In fact, most of the UK population shops online for the best deals. Some insurance companies do not feature on comparison websites, so if you want to get a true overview of online car insurance you should check their direct websites too (some have special offers that are worth the extra time spent investigating).

But if you choose to use comparison sites, are you getting a better deal?

On the one hand, it could be that the increased use of comparison sites has pushed the cost of car insurance up, because of course insurance companies have to pay a fee to feature on the comparison site websites. That fee is more likely to end up being passed onto the customer than affecting the company’s profit and loss account.

On the other hand, the use of comparison sites encourages insurance companies to offer their lowest prices because their quotes will be put right alongside other companies’ quotes for comparable policies. Competition at its finest.

But whether they are creating cheap car insurance products or not, online car insurance comparison sites are very popular and are being used with increased frequency. They are also proliferating in number – you can now easily spend two hours or more going to several different comparison sites, each of which can offer different prices for the same policies with the same insurance companies.

So how can you use comparison sites most effectively?

1. Take time to visit major insurers that do not use comparison sites (Direct Line springs to mind), to get an idea of what the policy would cost in the absence of this middleman. It may be that the comparison sites offer lower rates overall, but it may not. As always, fail to prepare and you prepare to fail.

2. Some comparison sites make assumptions (e.g. that you don’t have children under 10 in your car) when they give you their initial quotes. Only when you decide to accept a quote do you find that there are some extra questions that affect the price of that quote (having children under 10 in your car does increase your premium with several companies, for example). Read the fine print.

3. Finally, once you have selected a policy through a comparison site, don’t buy it there and then. Some comparison sites telephone you later in the day to offer you even cheaper policies that they may have available that aren’t advertised on the site. Patience is a virtue.