Price Comparison Sites

In recent years price comparison websites have made the process of shopping around for the best price a great deal easier. There is now a whole range of specialist comparison sites in various product and service niches. It's always worth trying two or three of them as they tend to have different suppliers listed. Here are some of the most useful ones:

General

http://www.pricerunner.co.uk

(Pricerunner was for a while my favourite price comparison site. Although I notice that it does appear to have been significantly dumbed down recently, particularly in the books section, which is now practically useless.)

http://www.kelkoo.co.uk

http://www.dealtime.co.uk/

Google shopping:

http://www.google.co.uk/prdhp?hl=en&tab=wf

General and Reviews

http://www.reevoo.com

http://www.ciao.co.uk

(Though Ciao was bought in 2008 by Microsoft which wouldn't necessarily encourage me to believe in its independence...)

Supermarket shopping

http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/

Financial

http://www.moneysupermarket.com/

http://www.moneynet.co.uk/

http://www.gocompare.com/

http://www.beatthatquote.com/

http://www.moneyfacts.co.uk/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/compareandbuy

http://www.lovemoney.com/managemoney/

Insurance

Whatever you do, make sure you use a price comparison site before buying or renewing insurance. If you doubt whether it's worthwhile, perhaps this little story might convince you.

We just received a home insurance renewal letter from Barclays proposing to charge us £356.99 for the next year.

I entered all our details into the moneysupermarket site and found that the cheapest we could get the same insurance would be £188, though that particular quote was from a dodgy looking company. For slightly more re-assuring looking names CoverDirect were quoting £218 and Bank of Scotland were quoting £238. The really surprising thing though was that Barclays themselves were quoting £260. So I rang up their call centre and asked why the £100 difference, to which I got a very unconvincing assurance that it wasn't just a common or garden rip off, and that I should try the Barclays website to see if I could get a better quote than through moneysupermarket. So I did that only to be very surprised that the Barclays quote was now £240, an offer which I took them up on. My wife expressed some surprise that we were going to go with a company which was so obviously willing to rip us off - but as the lady in the call centre pointed out "all the insurance companies do the same".

http://www.moneysupermarket.com/

http://www.gocompare.com/

http://www.beatthatquote.com/

http://www.confused.com

http://www.onlyinsurance.com

Utilities

http://www.uswitch.com

http://www.theenergyshop.com

http://www.moneysupermarket.com

http://www.gocompare.com/

Telecoms

http://www.homephonechoices.co.uk/

Broadband

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/
(formerly known as ADSLguide.org.uk)

http://www.broadbandgenie.co.uk

http://www.broadbandchoices.co.uk/

http://www.moneysupermarket.com/broadband/

Books

http://www.bookbrain.co.uk/

DVDs

http://www.find-dvd.co.uk/

Travel

(some of these are not strictly price comparison sites, but they do help you find out what the cheapest hotel or flight would be for a given destination).

http://www.travelsupermarket.com/

http://www.cheapflights.co.uk/

http://www.kayak.co.uk/

http://www.alpharooms.com

http://www.expedia.co.uk/

http://www.flightcomparison.co.uk

http://www.opodo.co.uk/