Regulator sues product comparison site alleged to only compare products on which it earned commission Australia’s Securities & Investments Commission has sued a product comparison website that it alleges only considered products from a related company. The regulator (ASIC) on Tuesday filed a claim [PDF] against an outfit called Choosi Pty Ltd that claims to operate a “team of Choosers” who “help you compare the benefits and …
I'm honestly not sure if i agree with this lawsuit (with a few assumptions).
As long as they don't market themselves as being "independent", and their comparison is accurate, what is the problem here? I think consumers have come to expect that comparison websites earn a commission for referrals. Any affiliation or commission should be transparently communicated though, even if this is what the user *should* expect.
I think it's a lot more problematic if these websites make unfair comparisons to competitors than it is to omit the competition entirely. Even the most basic due diligence of googling "life insurance" would show that there's more options and the comparison site isn't useful.
I disagree. Because claiming to be a comparison website is a lie, if you're only comparing stuff from one company. Hannover Insurance Policy Picker .com would be fair enough.
It's true that you can't expect comparison websites to be perfect. They may not even have access to all deals, there may be companies who won't wortk with them - and they may give undue prominence to the companies that pay them a commission. But in that case they're just a sub-optimal comparison website. This was a sham comparison website.
Reviews and comparison magazines/sites have been a scam for decades, it's not anything new.
USwitch literally only considers a small handful of things for me, and when I run off and do my own switch, things work better and I get far more options.
Same for car insurance, I can play a dozen comparison sites off against each other and many big-names only appear on a small handful of sites, and their deals are often not significantly better at all.
Same when you used to go into Dixons/Currys and look at their fridges and realise that it was a model number they had basically made up for an existing product, rebranded, and then sold in stores only to stop you "comparing" it because nobody else could sell that model number.
My distrust in all these things means that I rarely, if ever, use them and if I do I only ever use them to exploit their lowest deals entirely (because they do the old bait-and-switch on you to give you a good introductory deal which they later do not offer to any existing customers ever again, only new customers).
It's all a scam, and nothing much has changed in decades.
I know someone who would only ever buy whatever Which? magazine recommended, in all kinds of areas. Turns out they always ended up buying a load of overpriced old shite. I always just found it hilarious - I've worked in IT for nearly 30 years and they would ask me my advice, I'd steer them towards exactly what they needed, told them why "their" (Which?'s) choice was junk, and they would then just buy whatever Which? recommended, which was always junk, and then they'd try to complain to me and make me do support for it. Nope.
I now don't trust any comparison, professional review, or site that claims to be impartial. The only thing I can do is look up the product specs, demo it for myself, and try to cherry-pick through the mass-aggregate reviews of 10,000 or more users and try to find the one review that does raise items of concern to me. I literally can't trust anything positive, all I can do is hunt for the stuff that makes me suspicious, like a pessimistic old crone, and then see if they were right. You mean that NAS does fail a lot and the restore process is a pain in the butt? Yeah, that's what I want to know. Not that it got 5 stars against the same manufacturer's previous model's 4-and-a-half stars.
"Also: price isn't everything, but it's all the comparison sites look at."
Absolutely.
You can tell me that RyanAir is 50% cheaper or that I can save by using TalkTalk or that E-ON provide the better value all you like...
I wouldn't touch those kinds of bare-basic services with a bargepole, would happily pay more, and in some cases have literally blacklisted the company entirely for serious customer-service issues, etc.
I never understand why it's not more of a factor in such comparisons.
I don't care that you're a penny cheaper... how many thousands-more customers complain about you?
There's a reason we're not all just stabbing at our cheapest-available dinner with the cheapest fork on the cheapest plate heated in the cheapest microwave...
The bare-basic services you decry, may be all someone else wants. If a passenger wants to buy food and drink on a one hour flight, they can pay for it and the rest of the passengers do not have to subsidise them. Ryanair flies to many small airports, which may not be close to the city, but can be an awful lot closer than the next nearest airport. This saves half a day of travel and the cost of that travel. More money available to spend at the destination. There are downsides, like being on the last flight out of the airport when the plane ought to have taken off at 9pm.
Depending on who is paying for your flights and how much money they are willing to spend, a basic airline may be fine.
"Depending on who is paying for your flights and how much money they are willing to spend, a basic airline may be fine."
That's what he was saying when he said "There's a reason we're not all just stabbing at our cheapest-available dinner with the cheapest fork on the cheapest plate heated in the cheapest microwave...". ie some people see food merely as "fuel", or the cheapest is all they can afford, while others what a more tasty experience and like to savour the "extras". The comparisons sites are often designed as a race to the bottom in price and quality.
I agree that there should be at least a few different offerings to be able to claim a comparison is happening, but a lot of comparison engines are indeed pay-to-play. For instance, I'm pretty certain that the alternative shopping comparison sites that the EU forced Google to work with, like Redbrain and Idealo, are all getting paid for clicks — and the more merchants bid for a click, the more they get clicks.
YT and the balance of the internet is full of this fraud, "reviews" from...who knows, exactly?? Why am I supposed to trust you just because you say you're "qualified" to pass judgements on things? Over 1/2 the time the "review" is just repeating today's internet meme of "Get this, it's great!".
Buyer beware always takes hold. Only trust opinions from known sources.
I disagree. I think it's worse than independent reviewers, because some exist who are actually doing reviews. And no, they don't have a certification of review trustworthiness. You have to evaluate that yourself. However, some of them are just interested in a certain type of product and enjoy publishing their views, and if you're interested in that kind of product as well, their views may be quite useful. I have several independent reviewers that I trust because they provide a lot of useful information, sometimes obsessively so. This means that I can avoid either collecting it manually from companies' websites or, more likely, I get information that wasn't in their product descriptions or spec sheets but I care about.
Of course, there are reviewers who simply publish a "buy this" review of whoever gives them a commission. In my experience, they're usually obvious and easily rejected before I've read two paragraphs of their output. A fraudulent comparison website that didn't compare things is probably worse than those reviewers as well if it put effort into pretending to compare to others. Perhaps not worse from an ethical perspective, but worse from the user's annoyance level and likeliness to get scammed by it.
I believe because of the advertising on many mediums, people were lead to believe that this was a legitimate comparison site and nowhere except in the very small type on a buried link did it mention that it only compared products that came from a single company. Because of the proliferation of comparison sites ( Canstar, CompareTheMarket, Finder, etc) it is very easy to be misled that all sites compare all services.
There has to be a commission of some kind for these sites to exist, and indeed for insurance agents to exist, so accepting that they get paid for referring clients that successfully take out a policy is par for the course.
Also now there are a lot of regulations around financial advice and the information that must be provided, although I do not believe this has been pushed out to the wider insurance set.
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