Woot

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is written like an advertisement. Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view. For blatant advertising that would require a fundamental rewrite to become encyclopedic, use {{db-spam}} to mark for speedy deletion. (May 2009)

This article may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help by adding relevant internal links, or by improving the article's layout. (May 2009)

Woot, Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	2004
Headquarters	Carrollton, TX
Key people	Matt Rutledge, Founder & CEO
Industry	Retail
Products	Electronics, Household Goods, etc.
Revenue	US$164 million (2008) ▲ 39.7% from 2007[1][2]
Employees	140
Website	www.woot.com

Woot is an Internet retailer based in the Dallas suburb of Carrollton, Texas. It was founded by electronics wholesaler Matt Rutledge and debuted on July 12, 2004.^[3] Woot's main website generally offers only one discounted product each day, often a piece of computer hardware or an electronic gadget. Other Woot sites offer one original t-shirt per day, two selections of wine per week, one children's item per day, and one closeout deal per day in cooperation with Yahoo! Shopping.

Contents 1 Sales model 2 Marketing style 3 Special events 3.1 Woot-Off 3.2 Bag of Crap 3.3 Product launches 3.4 2-for-Tuesday 4 Wine Woot 4.1 Labrats 5 Shirt Woot 6 Sellout Woot 7 Kids Woot 8 Deals Woot 9 Criticisms and complaints 10 References 11 External links

[edit] Sales model

Woot's tagline is "One Day, One Deal". Generally, Woot offers one product per day until its stock of that item is sold out or the product is replaced at midnight Central Time with the next offering. If a product sells out during its run, the next item still does not appear until midnight, except during Woot-Offs. Products are never announced beforehand. This sales model means that Woot is unable to replace defective items and encourages customers to call the manufacturer if the item is defective. This now common One deal a day business model has been implemented by hundreds of web-based retailers since Woot's launch in 2004.

Customers may buy up to three of the day's item, although occasionally the site has limited product quantity to one per customer. Woot does not reveal sales figures unless the item sells out.

Woot uses FedEx Ground and ships only in the continental United States. Beginning in June 2007, Woot started shipping some smaller products with FedEx SmartPost, a service that uses the United States Postal Service for final delivery.

[edit] Marketing style

The company's marketing style is irreverent and often acknowledges its community of customers. Product descriptions often mock the product, the customer, or Woot itself. Product drawbacks are preemptively acknowledged and buyers are advised to beware. For those only interested in the serious details, the real information about the product is always listed below the woot-written description. Community users often do their own research and post their opinions on the user forums. The Woot staff identifies "Quality Posts", or quality excerpts from posts, and features them at the top of the forum. They tend to feature not just positive comments about the item, but also helpful negative comments and reviews, as well as competitive pricing links that users have posted.

Matthew Shultz records a daily podcast that is published on Woot's main site. This podcast briefly describes the item up for sale and includes a humorous song or skit.

Woot conducts Photoshop contests among its forum users for cash prizes. There are also several honorable mention winners, each of whom receive free shipping on an order. Another entry is awarded a Monkey Prize, typically a random monkey-related item of little or no value.

Community members have contributed back to the site by offering Woot-related services. These include:

• Several status checkers reporting when the next Woot product is listed
• Forums to swap Woot-purchased items
• Desktop widgets for Apple's Dashboard and the Windows Sidebar
• Live discussion webcasts about daily Woot items
• An IRC bot that informs users about the current item for sale
• An official Twitter account which as of May 31, 2009 is among the 100 most-followed accounts on Twitter^[4][5]

[edit] Special events

[edit] Woot-Off

The site occasionally deviates from the one-product-per-day model for a "Woot-Off", where a succession of products are available for a period of unannounced length, usually 24–72 hours. This mode is indicated by rotating lights and a bar displaying the percentage of product's stock remaining. When one product sells out, it is replaced within a minute or two by a new product. The percentage bar is the only indication of how much stock remains; Woot never gives the exact quantity available until after the item has sold out.

During April Fool's Day 2008, Woot staged a Woot-Off offering the same product repeatedly, except for a few brief periods when Woot sold Random Crap instead.

[edit] Bag of Crap

In lieu of typical product sales, Woot occasionally offers a blind grab bag officially called "Random Crap". Its accompanying picture has lent it the name "Bag of Crap" (BOC). The BOC contains at least three items whose value and quality are not guaranteed, but sometimes expensive items are included. The BOC typically triggers thousands of order requests and sells out within seconds. Processing a customer's order for a BOC may take over an hour.

[edit] Product launches

Beginning with the "gamma" launch of the Neuros MPEG 4 Recorder, Woot has occasionally partnered with another company to launch a new product with a one-day exclusive Woot sale. Launch events appear on Woot's home page with an animated rocket ship icon sometimes called the "Pope hat."

[edit] 2-for-Tuesday

Since January 10, 2006, Woot has two-packs of products every Tuesday. Woot has used this day to offer quantities greater than a 2-pack, such as 3-for-Tu3sday, 4-for-Tue4day, 5-for-Tue5day, 6-for-Tue6day, or 10X-Tuesday.

[edit] Wine Woot

Woot began beta testing Woot Wine (also known as wine.woot!) on May 22, 2006, and launched the spin-off on October 2, 2006. At launch, Woot Wine generally offered one new item (often a set of multiple bottles from the same winery) per week starting on Monday. Beginning in July 2008, two different items were offered every week, with the second offering starting on Thursday. Starting on October 5, 2009, Woot Wine expanded their offerings to three times a week, with new deals occurring on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Typically, the Friday deals involve non-wine items, such as a three-pound wheel of blue cheese and a juniper bonsai tree. Unlike the main Woot site, however, Wine Woot will occasionally offer new deals outside of the regular Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule if an item sells out.

On December 4, 2006, Woot sold a private-label cabernet sauvignon called Monkey Prize. It received an 89+ review from Gary Vaynerchuk in episode 137 of WineLibrary.tv, a video podcast wine-tasting.^[6]

Due to state legislation, Woot Wine items may only be delivered to a limited number of states. As the wineries are the seller of record (not Woot Wine), the list of states to which any given offer may be shipped is dependent on where the current winery can ship, and may change from offer-to-offer.

[edit] Labrats

Beginning the week of October 7, 2007, wine.woot began a new practice dubbed "Labrat". Customers can ask to be a Labrat. Eligible customers who make a winery purchase through Wine.Woot by 10 AM Central Time Monday may automatically receive an additional bottle or more of that week's offer overnight. Labrats are expected to taste the wine and to comment about it on the wine.woot forums that week.

[edit] Shirt Woot

Woot Shirts, also known as shirt.woot!, sold their first shirt on July 20, 2007 after a short beta test. The website began by offering one new T-shirt design every weekday. Beginning on September 1, 2007, shirts were offered on Saturday and Sunday.

Woot shirts are silk-screened on American Apparel shirts in Woot's Carrollton, Texas facility. Shirt design submissions are reviewed and selected by an editor in the St. Louis, Missouri offices of Woot. Most designs are from established artists, but Woot also conducts a weekly internet design submission contest called the "Shirt Design Derby" to solicit ideas from its forum community. Derby winners get a cash prize and a portion of the proceeds from shirts sold after the first day.

Woot has shirts on following days for a higher price. Links to the shirts are not made obvious from Woot themselves, but links can be found in the comments of each shirt and are revealed directly on Fridays. Every Monday, the shirts with the lowest sales are dropped from the production line through a process called "Reckoning" and discontinued.

Shipping policies for Woot Shirts differ from those of other Woot sites. Shipping is free within the United States. International or US overnight is 5 dollar flat fee per order.

Woot occasionally offers a Random Shirt day. Shoppers can purchase up to three randomly-selected usually discontinued shirts. Customers can only specify the size and quantity (up to three) desired, not the design. Some purchasers have reported receiving large numbers of shirts in their Random orders. Such shirts are typically misprinted in some manner, however.

Woot also began offering "Classic" shirts for sale on August 17, 2009. One shirt design, previously offered for sale but discontinued after its original run, is offered per week. These designs may be exactly the same as the original, or they may be "remixed," with details altered in some fashion. Classic shirts sell at a higher price than other shirts, and are not available after their week-long run.

Current pricing for Woot shirts is as follows: $10 for the daily offered shirt; $15 for previously offered shirts not yet discontinued through the "Reckoning" process; $20 for Classic shirts; and $6.66 for Random shirts.

[edit] Sellout Woot

On September 12, 2007, Woot entered into a partnership with Yahoo! and created a new site, sellout.woot.com.^[7] All product offers and fulfillment are managed by Woot, but users must enter the Woot Sellout site through Yahoo! Shopping's front page. New products appear at the same time as other Woot sites, seven days a week. On August 14, 2008, sellout.woot experienced its first "Sell-Off," similar to a Woot-Off. The first "sell-off" was selling only HDTVs.

[edit] Kids Woot

Kids.Woot! One Day, You'll Understand (sm) Woot launched Kids.Woot on August 18, 2009. It sells one item geared towards kids per day. Its first kids.woot-off was on October 28, 2009.

[edit] Deals Woot

A website operated by Woot,^[8] currently being beta tested. As explained in the site's FAQ, Woot Deals is a deals aggregator with two types of listings. One is the "Sponsored Deals" section, which has listings recommended by retailers and manufacturers, and also includes links to other daily deal sites. The second section, "Community Deals", consists of deals recommended by Wooters.

According to the invite letter, access is limited to woot.com users who have made a certain minimum number of purchases and/or are veterans.^[9]

[edit] Criticisms and complaints

Most customer complaints regarding Woot are related to shipping and delivery times.^[10] Some users have complained of their order not being shipped until they inquired on the status. There have also been unverified complaints about items being described as new but when received were clearly used^[11].

[edit] References

Notes

[edit] External links

• Official website