The UK Loan Store provides a wealth of information on many kinds of loans, including personal loans, car loans, home loans, and even student loans for the UK loan market. Investorblogger isn’t a stranger to reviews or to loan websites, having covered both the challengers and the underachievers. This review is for an advertiser, UK Personal Loan Store who sponsored a text link on the right sidebar.
Advantages
For those who live in the UK, access to uptodate information on loans is essential as rates, offers and special deals change daily. Many UK investors and borrowers are known as rate tarts for chasing the best deals in savings and in borrowings. Who can blame them when banks run teaser rates for deposits, accounts, credit cards and mortgages? But the banks have been getting wise to these tarts, as a recent Guardian Newspaper article reported, introducing transfer penalties, exit penalties, etc., despite these being probably illegal in many cases. Also, you can find a sitemap page that links to many articles to help you get access to the good stuff.
Challenges
There are a number of challenges that a site like this must face including the timeliness of information, lack of usable information and lack of visible signs of security.
1. I would recommend to the site owner to make sure that the special offers in the left hand bar are in fact updated. I clicked through them out of interest only to find 7 out of the twelve were in fact no longer available. Since I was looking for information only, that wasn’t a problem. But that could mean lost referrals and lost commission on subsequent sales. It could also leave users with a bad impression of the website as a source for reliable information. Perhaps the next time users want a loan, they will choose one of the myriad of competitors out there.
2. Once however you click on the loan information entitled UK Loan Comparisons, you’ll find that there are quite a lot of loans to choose from. Naturally, with so many offers available, and tailoring loans according to borrowers’ risk factors, it’s difficult to find out precise information about some of the loan offers. This is a pity, as it’s difficult to get any idea of what payments might be offered or what rates a client might expect.
3. On the one hand, users need information but have to give up a lot of personal information, not just an estimate, to get a rate quote. That would require a lot of trust in the website, especially given that it isn’t using an https: server or encrypted pages. I didn’t see any sign that pages are encrypted, verified or in any sense secure. This should be remedied in some form to build trust in your users.
Suggestions
To the user (ie. you and me): You will find the general information and layout of this website better than many, but will you find it so useful? You won’t be able to get quotations on loans without giving up a lot of personal information. This will certainly not help you decide if a loan is affordable or not BEFORE you apply. So, get your calculators (or calculator websites) ready when you surf this site, and you should be fine.
To the webmaster : Keeping your content and offers current is naturally a difficult task, but if you are going to run this kind of website, it’s a minimum requirement. In addition, make sure that visitors know that you will treat their information with confidentiality and securely. Your privacy policy is indeed present, but other features are notably absent. Lastly, if possible, try to provide ways for customers to work out if loans are affordable BEFORE they apply. At the very least, you can provide some loan calculators to help customers do the math.
In general, the more obstacles you remove from the path of potential borrowers, the more likely you are to earn their commissions as they take up deals in the knowledge that they are at least informed, uptodate and secure.
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