Hi people. How do those clever programmes work that compare prices on the internet for e.g car insurance quotes? That then make money by affilate marketing? Whish is the best forum and thread to find somone to build one of those? Cheers Valley
To be honest, dont go there unless you have a lot of money to invest. I worked in insurance for many years before leaving to form Astaroth Solutions but was involved in building in one of these sites. They receive commission from each sale - generally in the region of £35 but can be much higher. To have anything to do with Insurance in the UK you must be registered with the FSA and abide by the ICOB rules (Insurance Code of Business) plus a whole host of other legislation. You realistically would have to employ, on a long term basis, a compliance officer to ensure any messages on the site, adverts etc are all fully compliant with the rules (which change fairly frequently). The FSA is able to apply unlimited fines and can withdraw your license to operate for breach of the rules - for some light reading you can have a look at the 5,000 pages or so of the rules http://fsahandbook.info/FSA/html/handbook/
Jeepers! I have a toy site which is just a handful of affilate links which actually makes quite a decent amount of money considering the £6.00 investment. Just thought there may we a script for comparing the prices like money supermarket.com The FSA I am alreay familar with and I agree they are a pain in the neck, but they do have the consumers best interests at heart.
It is possible to script to do it, especially if you are good at writing scripts to circumvent protection mechanism such as captcha images. The problem is that you have exceptionally high costs to do it legally. A number of aggregator sites originally included a number of insurers without their permission which whilst they obviously received no commission from the sales did enable them to claim they had X number of insurers and could say they had all of the big insurers included - something not technically possible to do because of Direct Lines anti-aggregator stance. The companies in question paid very large sums out to the insurers in question under the table for the breach of trademarks etc. This was also at the time that the FSA was still finding its feet and before the ICOB rules had been introduced so they avoided those penalties but the FSA has been investigating even the basic affiliate advertising by non-regulated websites and if you look at the likes of tradedoubler and commission junction a number of the insurers have removed their schemes or at least put large notices that you place them at your own risk.
So ok two questions. ~1 Can I do a basic site with a page for each affililaite without being fined for heaven knows what #2 If I go FSA regulated, which I might as well anyway can I put all my 60 wbsites under the same FSA banner?
1) I assume there are still insurers offering affiliate links - if there are you can but you have to be very careful that you do not in any way promote or recommend that anyone clicks on them. If you are then you are looking at advisory level regulation which is even higher than most of the direct insurers like eSure have. The direct insurer I worked with was non advisory which meant that our representatives (werent allowed to call them advisors any more) werent even allowed to say "nice car" if someone said they had a Porsche or such as this could be interpreted as advising someone. 2)It will depend on the legal structure of the different sites/ companies. If they are all a single company and the different sites are different trading names then a single registration is most likely possible. To be honest you are stretching my knowledge and getting into the territory of needing professional advice