CASE STUDY | THE OFFICE OF FAIR TRADING (OFT)

How Greenlight helped bring transparency to the extended warranty industry

In April 2011, the Office of Fair Trading (now the Competition and Markets Authority) announced a market study into extended warranties within the domestic electrical goods market. Following the OFT’s investigation, key retailers entered into negotiations with the OFT in order to address the OFT’s concerns without the market being referred to the Competition Commission.

As a result of those negotiations, the Retailers gave a legally binding commitment to the OFT to establish a price/feature comparison website for electrical product extended warranties

The Office of Fair Trading undertook to work with leading retailers to bring pricing consistency and transparency to the Extended Warranty market of electrical goods.

Greenlight was approached to bring together Dixons Group, Home Retail Group and Comet, as the dominate players in Extended Warranties, and develop a Extended Warranty comparison website for consumers.

Objectives & Strategy

• • Define and document requirements through Discovery process
  • Co-ordinate the initial retailers’ to align conflicting product data into an agreed and comparable format
  • Develop a data management tool to enable warranty providers to securely manage their own data
  • Identify keywords that will drive search traffic and develop website to target the search traffic in the most optimal way
  • Design and execute content marketing strategy to ensure page 1 rankings for all target keywords within 6 months
  • Maintain content marketing strategy to retain rankings and search traffic in the long term
  • Provide robust, scalable and secure hosting for the website
  • Deliver live within 10 weeks and manage the onboarding of new providers

Unique Solution

Greenlight planned and executed a four-phase programme of discovery, design, development and deployment. Responsible for full end-to-end execution of the project, Greenlight overcame the challenges of managing the conflicting demands of a public sector body and three competing retailers. Greenlight also managed Comet’s departure mid-way through the process, mitigating the impact to the project.

A modern looking, fully functional and fully responsive comparison site was delivered according to the agreed timescales.

The site successfully passed strict penetration testing and security requirements and since launch the site has experienced 99.99% uptime.

Project Details

• Requirements definition
• Project Management
• Data integration tool development
• Responsive web design
• Front and back-end development
• Cloud hosting and support

RESULTS