Product and service comparison websites are popular online. If you search for POS software, it is likely that an ad from a comparison website will be the top result. Indeed, depending on the time of day you search, the first three or four results will be be for comparison websites advertising POS software.
What’s wrong with advertising? Nothing, if the claims in the ad are accurate.
Based on our personal experience, comparison websites do not provide the service they suggest they offer. While online the comparison website we worked with claimed to have compared POS software in order to recommend the best, no such comparison was undertaken. Once we saw, first hand, what they were doing we ended our short relationship with them.
Does this mean all comparison websites operate this way, claiming they have compared products and services to bring you the best? No. we can only speak to what we experienced ourselves. However, that experience was enough for us to say, no thank you. We will not engage with sites that claim something they do not do.
We wish the ACCC, state based Consumer Affairs and other authorities would look into the operation of comparison websites, getting behind the scenes, looking at the contracts and understanding the evidence. we think they will find that some comparison websites are an ad platform plain and simple – claiming to compare when they in fact do no such comparison. Shoppers are duped in these situations, thinking they are being recommended the best fit, the best software … when, in fact, they are being pitched software the comparison website is paid to ‘recommend’.
We wish Google would look at this as well as they are making money from the comparison website game being played. these websites pay Google too appear ahead of natural search results. They are profiting from the game being played.
Here at Tower Systems we want our software to be installed by businesses that choose it based on their own research and active comparison with other possible solutions. We want to be authentically chosen for good business reasons and not because we paid to come up first in some fake best of the best search result online.
If you are searching for a product or service and a comparison website advertises to be a top result, our advice is beware, do your research … choose based on what you discover for yourself and not based on what a nameless and faceless website claims is the best of the best. Deep pockets for advertising doe not make a company or product the best.
