As Margaret has quite rightly pointed out to me, our introduction of power “specials” has really bucked the trend for power companies, and has been a whole lot of fun too. Here’s a little sampler of those specials (in no particular order).
What's new
… and then there’s the specials!
36 Responses to “… and then there’s the specials!”
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I’m tossing up between Queen’s Birthday and Spring Clean Up as my personal favourite
December 14th, 2009 at 4:03 pmBring on the full moon…. hooowwwwllL!!!
December 14th, 2009 at 9:35 pmWhat does that say about you ari?
December 17th, 2009 at 11:13 am@Matt:
I’d hate to think!
December 17th, 2009 at 11:15 amcongratulations for looking after your crew over christmas
January 3rd, 2010 at 11:06 amhave a great new year
Being relatively new to Powershop I haven’t seen all the above specials but one I did see and thought it was great was the Christmas Chur special.
January 9th, 2010 at 6:56 amI get annoyed when I always miss out on these specials. I login two to three times a week but they have always sold out. If there is to be a special I think there should be at least enough for 1 per customer.
January 9th, 2010 at 3:43 pm@Paul:
Sorry you keep missing out. You can get early warning of the specials by becoming a fan of our Facebook page. Unfortunately, if we were to have enough specials for every customer we wouldn’t be able to make them so cheap, and then they wouldn’t be that special, so we have chosen to limit the number of these.
January 9th, 2010 at 4:17 pm@Paul
January 9th, 2010 at 6:22 pmTry my Powershop RSS tool. You’ll be notified when there’s a new product in the shop or when there’s a price change. http://www.psrss.co.cc
@Felix
I am interested in a product which will notify me, but
January 10th, 2010 at 12:41 amcan you tell me more about your RSS tool , please ?
It says “Granting access will allow this application to read your personal data and purchase power”.
I am happy with something which will notify me, but its a quantum leap to authorise it to make purchases on my behalf without knowing more.
@That’s Powershop’s standard message. My tool only reads data and does not purchase power, but Powershop does not allow me to make the difference.
The website provides you with a RSS feed of all the products available in the shop. You put that in your RSS reader so you get notified when there is a change.
January 10th, 2010 at 2:35 pm@Peter:
Powershop has developed what is known as an API – this allows third party providers (such as Felix) to develop tools and applications that interface directly with customer’s power accounts. We obviously require individual customers consent to give any application access to their account.
At this stage applications can access information such as your meter readings, consumption and product prices. Applications can also modify your account information in two ways:
1) they can update your meter readings.
2) they can ‘top up’ your account to a zero balance. If an application does this you will receive the normal email notification and if this was unintended you can use the 48 hour refund option.
So there very little risk that third party applications will operate your account in a damaging way.
Furter, as Felix points out, his RSS tool does not currently do anything other than download your products and prices.
January 10th, 2010 at 10:30 pmHi, thanks for reply on specials, I guess my point is though that say you went to a supermarket three times a week yet their specials were always gone I think you’d start to get somewhat frustrated. I really don’t see this as being much different. In fact I think they are required to have enough product to cover advertised specials.
January 11th, 2010 at 8:16 am@Paul:
I understand your point, but I guess not all specials are created equal.
A number of the specials we run do have sufficient numbers to allow one per customer (generally those specials over long weekends etc). The ‘steal-a-deal’ specials are a bit more of a lottery – these are intended to incentivise and reward people for logging on and engaging with their account. If you are quick enough to pick up one of these it is really just a bonus to your savings
January 11th, 2010 at 10:06 amAri, I’ve noticed most steal-a-deals appear in the morning and sell-out within a couple of hours. To be fair, perhaps you could run some evening ones so that people who don’t have the opportunity to log on during the day, like at work, miss out?
January 11th, 2010 at 11:40 am@Jared:
We do sometimes ‘release’ steal-a-deal products later in the day. We started doing this in response to a similar comment from another customer a while ago. I make sure we continue to mix it up a bit.
January 11th, 2010 at 11:52 amHi Felix, thanks for the RSS info which should be useful. Seems like a better idea than logging on to my account twice a day, power just ain’t that exciting
January 13th, 2010 at 1:50 pm@Paul:
What do you mean power ain’t that exciting
January 13th, 2010 at 1:54 pmMy Value Pack and Standard Power are currently 16.93 and 17.07 cents/unit respectively.
So at 17.04 cents/unit the Waitangi Day special fails to live up to its advance billing on twitter as “a whooper of a special”.
February 6th, 2010 at 8:02 amAm happy to report that my cost per unit for the Waitangi Day special has now changed from 17.04 cents/unit to 15.86 cents/unit. Thanks, Powershop.
February 6th, 2010 at 3:20 pmPeter,
February 7th, 2010 at 10:58 amBut Christmas (11.49c) hasn’t come again.
@Ari
Could you confirm if the limit 1 for the birthday special is limit 1 for the whole week or limit 1 for each hour it appears?
February 22nd, 2010 at 2:03 pm@Warwick:
It is one per customer over the whole week.
February 22nd, 2010 at 2:52 pmWhere can I find 3rd party applications for powershop?
May 8th, 2010 at 3:36 pm@Brook:
To date I am only aware of two 3rd party apps that are publicly available:
1) A Powershop RSS product feed developed by Felix Lee (http://psrss.co.cc/).
2) The Power Kiwi iPhone app (http://j.mp/9kHztu – iTunes link)
Powershop also has an iPhone app that will be available soon.
If you are interested in developing your own apps see our developers page.
May 8th, 2010 at 4:59 pmSorry, but I don’t “get” this RSS product. I logged in and now I’ve got a page that’s blank except for the text ‘Powershop RSS’ in the top left-hand corner.
Am I supposed to keep that page open all the time? It has no buttons or controls on it.
June 9th, 2010 at 2:08 pm@Arnie:
To use Felix’s RSS product you will need an RSS/News Reader – there are plenty of free readers you can download (just search “rss reader”), or you can use an online reader such as the Goggle Reader. After you have logged in the RSS product you should see your property address and some links after it. You will need to copy and paste the feed URL into your RSS feeder as a subscription.
You should also note that the Powershop RSS product was not developed by Powershop and as such is not directly supported by us.
June 9th, 2010 at 4:47 pmThanks for the reply. I should have made it clear that I was directing my query to the developer.
Anyway, seems it only works in *shudder* Internet Explorer. In Firefox you just see the text I mentioned, no links. But I condescended to nip in and out of IE long enough to get the link for my reader.
June 9th, 2010 at 5:28 pm@Arnie:
Strange, it works for me in Firefox (v3.6 OSX). I have just had a look at the page source, and it is pretty lean and doesn’t include standard HTML page tags – this is probably throwing a spanner in the works.
At least you’re up and running now, even if it dig take a little help from IE.
June 9th, 2010 at 6:12 pmHi Arnie, Felix here. I developed it using Firefox, so it is strange it doesn’t work on your computer. Sorry about that.
June 9th, 2010 at 7:34 pm@Felix:
Looking at the html source of your page it appears to be missing the basic ,
, and tags – perhaps if you put these in it may solve the problem? June 10th, 2010 at 9:21 amYeah, it’s a bit rough.
June 10th, 2010 at 5:57 pmWell, I changed computers and didn’t worry for a while that I no longer got the specials in my reader (because I hadn’t set it up), but I just went to do it now and it’s gone!
Also, I have noticed whenever I’ve gone in to buy power that there are *never* any specials any more (at least not when I’ve visited).
Is the RSS available anywhere else? Are there still specials?
January 27th, 2011 at 5:18 pm@Arnie:
Yes, we certainly are still running regular specials. As you say the RSS feed is no longer available; this was actually provided by a developer using the Powershop API, and not by us directly. I am not aware of any alternative feeds. Generally specials will be announced on our Facebook Page and our latest iPhone app also has pricing alerts.
January 27th, 2011 at 6:04 pmOkay, that’ll do. Thanks.
January 31st, 2011 at 6:40 pmSo whats happend to all the specials? Not only have the prices risen significantly, we dont seem to be seeing as many specials?
May 31st, 2012 at 1:10 pm