Energy prices (slightly OT)

[F]

But you using Flipper won't stop cashback. Flipper will continue to receive it, along with your £25.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

They said in their blurb they didn't. But perhaps none of the companies that do cashback are offering the best deal anyway. If you think about it.

[dennis]

As they are the cheapest available and you get cash back they must offer the best deal.

Maybe flipper doesn't include all the deals like MSE does?

You don't get cash back on all the deals on MSE because with some of the suppliers you can *only* switch to them by going to their web site or using the phone so they probably aren't on flipper in the first place.

However MSE will tell you about them without you having to tick extra boxes to include them like uswitch, etc.

[F]

Some of the best deals don't come with cashback, some do and that's something I take into account.

I've just changed to Bulb. They offered the best deal and they were giving £100 cashback at the time. The £100 was credited to my account on the day they took over and they've transferred it out into my bank account.

If you're interested, check them out (bulb.co.uk/refer/frank9046 - referral link). You get £50, I get £50, there are no exit fees and they refund any exit fees you have to pay to leave your current supplier.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Why not give you a cheaper price direct?

I dunno. Everyone seems to have a different take on what is best. Same as insurance. But as with that, no one size fits all.

They are probably trying to avoid paying commission to a third party. The main beauty of Flipper (to me) is that it doesn't take commission from a supplier, but charges you upfront.

As I said the whole thing is a minefield. To me, at least.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

What I wanted was something upfront and honest. Not one who gave 'free gifts' etc to try and get your business. Although Flipper did offer you an incentive to direct new customers to them, which I don't like either. If you think of it, with very low interest rates for most, 'giving' you cashback is of little use. I'd rather have it deducted from my monthly bill. Cashflow is important to most companies so you will be paying handsomely for that cashback one way or another.

Perhaps I'm very rare in wanting this - hence Flipper failing.

[Andy Burns]

I don't want a fluffy toy with my insurance, to me that sort of thing just shows they're not focussed on removing unnecessary costs.

If Bulb can afford to bung £100 cashback, that seems higher than most of the MSE cashbacks, if they can afford an additional £50 referral plus £50 cashback per new customer, to my mind they could lower their prices and attract the customers who are shopping around.

[dennis]

So you get the same deal as someone using MSE/uswitch but don't get any cash back and you pay them to save a couple of minutes and you don't check its actually the best deal.

Sounds OK to me.

[dennis]

flipper is bound to fail as their business model is faulty. You can get the same or better deals(1) for free so why would you pay them to do it?

1: Some like MSE negotiate group discounts with suppliers to get cheaper deals if a lot of people switch to them. These deals are not available to the likes of flipper but they could negotiate their own if they wanted to. AFAIK they haven't in the past.

[dennis]

The cash back is more attractive to low users than a cheaper rate. Maybe they want the low users and not the big users?

Its all down to marketing, finding something to attract your target market.

[alan_m]

If flipper is switching you to the same suppliers that do give a commission, which results in a third party returning some of it in the form of a cash-back, then flipper will be taking the same commission and not passing it on to you.

With money from both customers and suppliers I wonder what went wrong with their business model and that they had to go into administration for a few weeks.

Cashback often can make the difference of £25 or £50 extra saving depending on which site you use to switch. Going directly to the suppliers web site and you lose out on this extra discount. I guess its much like insurance, a discount for new customers in the hope that at the end of a year contract you cannot be bothered to look around to see if anything is cheaper.

I'm much more wary of sites that offer cashback on one off purchases - usually from retailers that charge more than their competitors in the first place or aimed at people that have a brand loyalty for lifestyle products.

Yes, just taking one of the suggestions in this thread and using the same information on energy consumption on two sites for the same energy company today I could either save £47 or £72 per year (mainly on cashback and a saving of around £2 month on the actual energy). The gamble with this supplier is that it isn't a fixed price contract so the tariff could rise soon.

[newshound]

Having skimmed the responses to date, I suppose I'd have to say I trust Which? (who are very open about getting kickbacks), am a bit more cautious about Moneysavingexpert although it is certainly a site I have looked at in the past, and would be slightly more careful about Flipper.

Fair comment that I have not checked the market for three or four years. My consumption is probably a bit higher than average, but not "mansion" scale. *Slightly* surprised not to find Ovo not offering something else reasonably competitive to what I guess is their "standard variable rate" tariff which kicked in a couple of weeks ago when my previous deal expired.

The other interesting finding (to me) was that duel fuel deals are no longer generally competitive. If you don't mind taking a chance on an unknown name rather than one of the big six, then going for small players who specialise only in one market perhaps makes more sense. These days, with paperless online systems and DD, the old savings from a "single bill" and "single payment" are evaporating.

And all credit to Which? for headlining the point about duel fuel.

[alan_m]

I get the impression that a company will offer a good deal in order to gain 100,000s of new customers and then not have another competitive deal until they have lost X% of those new customers. They can make more money from customer inertia - customers not realising they have been moved to higher tariff for 3 months or more.

The other trick that they often play is after, say, 6 months suggest you should move to another of their saver tariffs without paying a penalty. They will suggest that these tariffs save you money compared to the tariff you are on but in reality they are more expensive. They use the industry standard way of calculating your YEARLY spend on the two tariffs - one of which will include 6 months of energy at the higher standard tariff . This may result in a customer staying with the supplier for a number of years because each switch results in a new 12 month contract with penalties if changing to another supplier.

In my last two moves the company I was with was one of the cheapest at the time but at the end of the year any followup fixed price contracts with them tended to be the more expensive in the marketplace.

By the way, if you pay by DD check your bank statements during the switch period. When I switched away from British Gas a good number of years ago they erroneously applied the early end of contract penalties. The penalty amounts NEVER appeared on any bill but were taken as two separate DD payments (dual fuel) straight from my bank account.

[F]

As far as I'm concerned, the cashback is the same as 'lower prices'. I just happen to get it in a lump sum. With the way Bulb have treated the cashback I could leave them tomorrow if there was someone cheaper.

It's a jungle out there and I'll take any (legal) option open to me to lower my energy costs.

[Andy Burns]

carpetbagger! :-)

[newshound]

Thanks for the warning, will look out for that!

[bert]

Me too as I've just left BG (Sainsburys Energy)

[F]

Switching up to 49 days before the end of a contract negates any exit fees. So should avoid that problem?

[alan_m]

It should do, but in my case BG made a mistake and the money was refunded after I'd noticed that they had taken it As it it didn't appear on any bill it could have been easily missed if bank statements were not thoroughly checked.

The other gotcha may be with a dual fuel deal in that switching of the electric and gas were at different dates and hence if the contract was for 12 months rather than a fixed end date there could be up to a month difference in the end of contract dates.

[Steve Walker]

Probably because you are not a new customer. OVO was the best fixed deal for me, but previously Sainsburys, NPower, EDF and a couple of others have been - all but one for one time only, then the repeat price has been way above what I can get elsewhere.

Single bills would have been cheaper for me, but at only about £10 a year less, I decided that covenience would win out and went for the dual fuel offering.

SteveW