Comparison services revolutionise the costs of research.

Say Mrs Smith in Scunthorpe spends three hours and some money researching the market for digital cameras (what is a pixel? How much memory do I need? How do I get prints? Etc). Once she has learned what she needs to know and chosen her particular product, that research effort is effectively spent. There is no way she can package it up and give it to Mr Jones in Scarborough who happens to be asking exactly the same questions. He has to start again from scratch, thereby re-inventing the wheel.

In industrial age economies, millions of individuals are reinventing wheels in this way, across hundreds of categories and thousands of purchases.

Now imagine a service that captures the information gathered by Mrs Smith to re-present it to Mr Jones. Say it cost Mrs Smith £100 to conduct her research. For just one purchase, that adds £100 to the cost of the item purchased. But say 10,000 people are able to use the same information. Then the unit cost of exactly the same piece of research falls to just one penny: a massive boost in productivity.

This is the principle behind price and other comparison services. They slash the cost of research thereby enabling people to do more research at less cost – leading to better decisions.

Currently however, the comparison industry is hampered by numerous limitations. These include:

• Narrow scope: usually just price, which may be positively misleading (What is the connection between purchase price and life time cost of ownership, for example?) Most comparison services do not provide meaningful, usable comparisons on the basis of quality, service, environmental or ethical credentials of suppliers etc.

• Lack of advice: today’s services assume that buyers know exactly what they are looking, and understand the implications of all the technical and functional attributes listed. Comparison without understanding is of very little value.

• Suspect incentives: many comparison services see themselves as being lead generation devices for sellers rather than shopping services for buyers. They earn their income from seller commissions and often bias the information they present in favour of those sellers offering the highest commission. This violates the core buyer-centric principle of helping individuals to make the right decision for them.

For all these reasons, we should see today’s comparison services as just the very beginning of a long journey of evolutionary development.