online car quote via MSE insurance tool - result changes by the minute?

Bookworm105

Strange! You need to pick your time of day to get a car quote as results vary?

Just used the MSE car insurance quote tool and it appears to only show MoneySupermarket result, of which Swinton was cheapest. So far, so good as was lower than my existing renewal quote.

However, it is a while since I used the MSE tool, so was expecting to see links to the other comparison sites. The MSE tool implied there may be links to other sites so I back tabbed to see if I'd missed them. What I had not realised was doing so reset the screen, so I had to start again.
You can imagine my confusion therefore when, having filled in the details against, the quotation summary was for the same company but it was now £6 cheaper than the first result it had shown me not less than 5 minutes previously.

So I decided to accept and was directed to the insurer's own website, which then gave me two policies to choose between "Classic" (at the price quoted by MSE) and "Premier" at a lower price but with extra cover (misfuelling and a hire car for 14 days if mine is stolen)

So it appears not only must one follow the MSE guidance as to best time to renew (X days before policy date) but one apparently also has to trust to luck that the time of day you run the quote is also the cheapest, and don't expect the MSE result to actually be the cheapest!
(I do not do Direct Line as experience is I am not their target market)

DullGreyGuy

It's not so much time of day but what other quotes are happening at the same time as you. Insurers want to sell policies but if they start selling too many they may become concerned that they've made a pricing mistake and everyone else knows something they dont. 

Been a fair few years since I did pricing for consumer lines like Motor but even then we were starting to play with AI such that the rating engine would start lowering prices if conversion was too low and start raising prices if we were winning more business than we expected. Given the years of development since then you'd expect it to have gotten more sophisticated. 

Given MSE is owned by MoneySupermarket you'd expect their tool just to be a rebadged version of the MS tool rather than promoting their competitors like confused.com

Bookworm105

thanks, didn't realise the impact of the ownership was so blatant. 
I'll do things independently next year and see if cutting out MSE's commission for using the comparison sites makes a difference as well.

DullGreyGuy

All the comparison sites charge the insurers commissions, for Motor it used to be about £65 per sale made

This is the principle of Direct Line and co not playing on them but of cause its swings and roundabouts as if you dont pay the aggregators you are instead having to pay for marketing, Google can charge over £10 for a single click to your website on terms like "car insurance" irrespective if that person goes on to get a quote or leaves instantly and clearly you dont manage to get a sale out of every quote done.