gocompare.com/useful/necessary/innovation?

Key online brands and etailers are pulling out of price-comparison sites, questioning their effectiveness and calling for greater innovation and user interaction.

Pure-play electronics retailer Dabs.com said traffic quality from price-comparison sites had dropped in the past year, so it has reconsidered how it works with them.

These comments were echoed by gadget etailer Firefox and electronics manufacturer Casio.

Jonathan Wall, Dabs.com marketing director, said, "We always used to put a third of our digital marketing budget into Google, a third into affiliates and a third into shopping channels. But over the past 12 months we've seen a decline in the traffic quality from some of the shopping channels. We now put more like two-thirds into Google, a third into affiliates and a smidgen into shopping channels.

"We did a lot of customer scoring on them and they were half as likely to come back and buy from us again as the customers we acquired from Google," he added.

Naomi Brown, online marketing executive at gaming and gadget etailer Firebox, said there was more pressure on price-comparison sites to add a point of difference that leads to the conversion.

"We've pulled out of a few sites," she said. "We monitor carefully which are performing well, and that does vary. The difference is that some sites innovate much more than others, so the ones we see doing well are those that add value - user product reviews, for example."

Similarly, Alex Dibble, digital marketing executive at Casio, said that the user experience on such sites is often not as well executed as it could be. "Price-comparison sites like Google Product Search and PriceGrabber were good early on, but nowadays there are so many confusing elements to such sites, such as differing delivery options."

However, Mattias Berg, MD of Pricerunner.co.uk, said that the focus for his site was to make the customer journey experience as fulfilling as possible.

"If price-comparison sites don't add value then of course retailers are going to think whether they want to work with them or not," he said.