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Amazon launches insurance comparison business in the UK
If a thief does slip past your Amazon Ring security camera, the e-commerce giant may soon have you protected.
Amazon launched a new insurance comparison service in the UK on Wednesday. It’s entering a fairly crowded market, competing with household names like Go Compare and Compare The Market, both of which are deeply ingrained in Britons thanks to ad campaigns that make GEICO’s car mouth gecko look sedate. in the brain. But new products could help Amazon generate more cash.
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Of course Amazon wants to everythingThis time, the spirit has taken it to the insurance comparison business, a niche but lucrative industry that is particularly popular in the UK. Unlike Americans, who tend to buy insurance outright, Brits prefer price comparison platforms like GoCompare and Moneysupermarket, which help users navigate their options while taking a cut of any final sale in the process. In that sense, Amazon’s price comparison tool, known as the Amazon Insurance Store, isn’t all that different from the advertising game it has long run on its flagship e-commerce service, offering favorable offerings to companies willing to pay position. Still, it has a way to dominate the price comparison market, with only three insurers — Ageas, Co-op and LV — signed up as participating partners at launch.
While this is Amazon’s first foray into the insurance comparison market, it has already ventured into the insurance space through a handful of partners. It also entered the vacuum left by Google, which tried to build its own insurance comparison service but relegated the project to Google Graveyard in 2016 just a year later. Amazon got off to a very small and simple start:
- The price comparison service, which is currently only available to a small number of UK Amazon account holders, will be slow to roll out and will focus on home insurance. Amazon’s acquisition of doorbell monitoring company Ring in 2018 has already established itself in the home security market. Amazon hopes simplicity is the key to its success. Users can choose and pay for all insurance without leaving Amazon’s website. Financial TimesA Hargreaves analyst told the BBC that this model has worked in Amazon’s retail sector, but the looming cost of living crisis may make consumers more willing to go through the painful selection process to find a good deal.
Be careful with data: The data you give to insurers is highly sensitive, and Amazon has faced questions from lawmakers in the past about how carefully it divides and protects the vast amounts of data it handles. It promises to keep insurance data separate from other businesses. As a reminder: Former CEO Jeff Bezos told Congress in 2020 that he could not guarantee that third-party seller data was being shared in a way that violated company policy.