Walmart Offers Auto Insurance Online

Walmart recently announced an auto insurance comparison service designed to help drivers quickly buy and save significantly on policies.

To provide the service, the retailer is working with Autoinsurance.com, which offers consumers multiple quotes from many of the leading national insurance carriers, including Progressive, Esurance, Safeco and The General. The Autoinsurance.com offering allows users to compare and buy policies in one place online.

The new Walmart service is available in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Texas, and the company plans to offer it nationwide over the coming months.

The launch of the service followed a pilot program conducted in Pennsylvania last year, in which customers who bought policies from AutoInsurance.com and reported their savings cut their annual insurance costs by $1,168 on average.

Walmart is the exclusive retailer and marketing partner of AutoInsurance.com, and its customers will be able to access the service directly from the retailer’s Web site. The retailer was “looking for a company that could bring transparency and competition to the marketplace, and we found that with AutoInsurance.com," according to a company spokesperson.

“Our customers too often have to settle for auto insurance policies that aren’t the best fit and cost more than they want to spend,” says Daniel Eckert, SVP of services for Walmart U.S. With the new service, “we're helping our customers save money on one of their largest household expenses in a new, quick and easy way.”

With the Autoinsurance.com platform, within a matter of minutes consumers can receive real-time quotes from multiple carriers by entering information, including their name, address, date of birth and contact information, on the site, says Alex Kaufman chief marketing officer at Autoinsurance.com.

“They can then quickly and easily compare apples-to-apples quotes, choose the coverage and carrier that is the best for them, and immediately buy a policy online through the site," Kaufman says.

Users can opt-in to have the site retrieve their current auto insurance policy, which allows AutoInsurance.com to automatically fill in most of the necessary coverage information and provide a direct quote comparison. Within minutes, the platform provides users with multiple quotes from carriers. They can customize their coverage, including deductibles, and see those choices immediately reflected in the quotes.

A national survey commissioned for Autoinsurance.com, which queried more than 5,000 drivers, showed that nearly half of the respondents felt they were overpaying for insurance, including health and auto, more than any other recurring monthly expense. The survey showed that auto insurance premiums take a particularly heavy toll on the finances of younger drivers, who account for a large portion of online shoppers.

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