As some of you may remember, I wrote a while ago about comparing comparison sites.

It’s that time of year again, so no surprise that I received a stupidly large (£350) renewal quote – from Swinton, underwritten by Premier Underwriting.

So I did my normal annual scout around the comparison sites & found a much better deal (£188) – from Swinton, underwritten by Premier Underwriting!??

I then spotted that I could get £40 cashback if I bought from Swinton via Quidco – so… off I go (on another machine sitting next to this one) & clickthrough from Quidco & start entering my details – I actually kept the £188 quote from Swinton open on this machine & copied every single field of the form identically. Guess what the quote was after clicking through Quidco? £222! What? How cheeky – they upped the premium by £34 to cover the cashback – but wait – what’s that small print? £222 is after the £40 cashback! – So they actually bumped up the premium by £74 when clicking through from Quidco rather than confused.com

Not happy with this at all. To make matters worse – when I tried to actually buy the £188 quote – it was forcing me into monthly payments of £19.60 – & adding a hefty chunk of interest on at the same time. I clicked the ‘modify’ link & changed my preference from monthly to annual & it still insisted on quoting me a monthly premium – which has now risen to £24.16 – although I now see a link that says “Do you want to pay annually?” – clicking this link then presents me with an annual premium of £232.

So – as I said in the title of this blog post – is this as it seems & Swinton are guilty of Shady practices or is it a genuine error?

Here are a few screenshots (with personal information blurred).

confused.com showing an annual premium of £188

A click through to Swinton & I still see the £188 annual premium

Here's what I get after keying EXACTLY the same details after clicking through Quidco

Here's how the £188 quote looks after selecting 'Annual' rather than 'Monthly' - Note that it's still trying to push me into monthly payments - but a link has appeared to switch to Annual

& when I do click the link to switch to annual payment - the premium jumps up to £232

Remember that for all of the above quotes – the exact same details have been entered – word for word.

So – What did I do? I went with the £19.60 per month option & phoned to see if I could pay them the whole year in one go & forego the interest & credit agreement. A really nice lady @ the Farnborough branch of Swinton, said she couldn’t help personally but was confident that her Manager could if I called back on Monday…

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Here’s a list of the top 50 Best Selling books (source : Nielsen).
The quantity sold is listed along with the RRP.
I’ve linked the title & the author to the book on Amazon UK.

How many have you read?

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I know that this has been in testing since 2007 but I’ve been seeing it more & more often recently.

What happens is that you search for a product & when the results are displayed you see the normal adwords ads, but one of them (this can be above the results or on the right hand side) will have a hidden div & the text “Show products from RETAILER for SEARCHTERM” it might look like this (at the top):-

or like this (on the right):-

& when expended, they look like this :-

& this :-

Now I’m sure you’ll agree that this is quite cool – & if you can ever get any control over it, it could improve conversions. The data is being pulled from a google products account so this will be more something for merchants than affiliates though.

Oh, one final thing, All of the above screenshots are from a search for 32″ tv amazon. Do Tesco (& eBuyer, Dixons, Money Supermarket, Revoo, Nextag etc. really think I want to see their ad when I’ve specified Amazon?

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First post for a while – been stupidly busy & any free time tends to get wasted used on twitter.

I was looking at the source code of the Google UK homepage earlier on & spotted some strange code.

So, they have a hidden textarea, with an ID of “csi” & they have a js function which loads with their logo which makes the window lol & lol.

Any conspiracy theorists care to hazzard a guess as to what they’re up to?

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Unfortunately, I’ve been completely snowed under at work recently & have been neglecting this blog.
I have a list of things I want to write about but haven’t yet managed to….

Here’s the list :-

• ChannelAdvisor – what it does & how I use it
• Recommended WordPress Plugins
• Affiliate Theme – Why it’s crap
• Affiliate Theme – Why it’s great
• CJ Datafeeds – why I don’t like them
• Excel trickery – cleaning datafeeds & timesavers
• Expensive Chocolate – how I built it in less than 2 hours
• 3M Select – relaunching the affiliate program

I think I’ll probably get around to writing all of the above at some stage, but if you would like one or more of them sooner rather than later, please let me know in the comments below.

EDIT : posted this as a poll on A4U if you’d rather use that…..

TTFN

BFG

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Here’s an example (from here):-

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BFG

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• The Prescription for Self-Doubt: Watch This Video
• Amazon bucks trend : Q4 sales up 18%
• WordPress SEO Video : Yoast
• More On Google Website Optimizer
• Whiteboard Friday – When to Track Rankings

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BFG

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Anyway -- onto the video….

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BFG

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Any twitterers out there may have seen some twitter based competitions, @johnchow & @shoemoney are a couple that spring to mind.

It’s an interesting idea – basically to enter you need to follow them on twitter & send a tweet to all your followers that you’ve entered by following them & they can do the same.

I guess the aim is to gain 10′s of thousands of followers – but the question is why?

Is it vanity – a chance to say look how great I am because I have 20k followers on twitter?, or is it just stupid?

I’d like to hope that they have some grand plan to monetise all these followers. Maybe they plan to drive traffic to their own blogs ( http://www.johnchow.com & http://www.shoemoney.com respectively ).

So – whaddaya think? Vanity, Insanity or Genius?

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BFG

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Stephen Fry looks a little messed up

Here’s what it should look like :-

Stephen Fry looking a little better

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BFG

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