Woot

For the internet slang term, see w00t.

Woot, Inc.

File:Wootlogo.gif
Company type	Private
Industry	Retail
Founded	2004
Headquarters	Carrollton, TX
Key people	Matt Rutledge, Founder & CEO
Products	Electronics, Household Goods, etc.
Revenue	approximately $40 million annually
Number of employees	25-30
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. Woot is believed to have pioneered the "One deal a day" business model. Woot offers one discounted product each day on its web site, woot.com. The product is available for 24 hours; it "expires" at midnight (US Central time) and is replaced by a different product for the next day.

Woot has a community of customers who share their opinions on the site’s forums. Products vary but tend to emphasize computer components and electronic gadgets.

Woot takes its name from the widely-used online interjection “w00t!”. Each product sold is referred to as the "woot."

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 and can easily sell out in a few hours or even minutes of frenzied buying. However, occasionally, there are undesirable items that get bashed on in the forums. In contrast to a market characterized by ever-expanding consumer choice, the Woot.com approach relies on the elements of simplicity and surprise.

Customers may typically buy up to three of the day's item, although the site has been known to limit product quantity to one per customer on occasion. Woot does not reveal how many units remain available in a given sale, but animates the "I Want One" button when 10 percent or less remains. If the product sells out, the site lists how many were sold.

The company charges a shipping fee of $5.00 per order, regardless of quantity of items purchased or shipping destination. Woot ships only to addresses within the contiguous United States.

Marketing style

The company’s marketing style is irreverent. Product descriptions often mock the product, the customer, or Woot itself. Product drawbacks are preemptively acknowledged and buyers are advised to beware. Community users often do their own research and post their opinions — positive, negative, or indifferent — 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.

Special events

Woot-Off

The site will occasionally deviate 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 indicating the usually unknowable amount of product remaining.

Since the next item in the Woot-Off will not be listed until the current item is sold out, posters in Woot's forums occasionally use peer pressure to advocate the purchase of the current item. This selling of an item that few people actually want is called a "wootatrocity" or "Woot-Off Killer". Often members will boast of buying the current item just to advance the Woot-Off.

During an average two day Woot-off, Woot's sales can exceed one million dollars.

Bag O' Crap

In lieu of typical product sales, Woot occasionally offers a blind grab bag called “Bag O’ Crap” (“BOC”). This includes dollar store items and may also randomly include more expensive electronics items. Customers may buy up to three bags for $1.00 each, as in the usual model, or on some occasions may only buy one $1.00 bag that comes with three bags' worth of gear. Customers are urged to purchase in quantities of three to minimize the percentage cost of shipping and maximize the probability of getting something of greater value. The "BOC" typically sells out within seconds of furious ordering, overloading the woot.com servers in the process as potential buyers frantically try to reload the ordering pages. This is considered to be part of the fun by most Woot forum members, but leaves many people angry and frustrated.

Officially, the Bag O' Crap is sold under the title of "Random Crap."

Since "BOCs" are often referenced in the Woot forums, Woot's forum software filters the text to spell out tongue-in-cheek phrases with the same initials, such as "Blinged-out cabbage", "Braille on Cookies", "Bandolier of Carrots", and others.

Product launches

On a few occasions, beginning with the "Gamma" Launch of the Neuros MPEG 4 Recorder, Woot has partnered with another company to launch a new product on its website. This "Launch Event," designated by an animated rocket ship, indicates Woot is the first and only place (as of that day) that has an available quantity of the sale product. The icon representing the rocket is not clear to some users, and is often referred to as the "Pope hat".

2-for-Tuesday

Since January 10 2006, Woot has offered two-packs of products every Tuesday. These products have ranged from TV games to keyboard and mouse combos to toasters. A customer can purchase up to three two-packs.

On February 6 2007 Woot ran a new 'X-for-Tuesday' in which it offered 10 Kensington Keyboards (which ship in a box of 10). This appears to have been a one-time occurrence.

Woot Wine

Woot began beta testing Woot Wine (aka wine.woot!) on May 22, 2006, and officially launched the spin-off on Monday, Oct 2, 2006. The slogan is "One Week, One Wine". They provide identical statistics to the main site, as well as the "percentage of sales per day". The week begins on Monday.

On December 4, Woot began selling their own private label on Woot Wine. The name of the wine is Monkey Prize and it is described as a Woot Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon. A Half case of the wine has been sold for $59.99 and received an 89+ review from a Video Wine Tasting

Photoshop contests

Woot also offers Photoshop contests every weekend, with cash prizes going to the top 3 entries. There are also several honorable mention winners, each of which get free shipping on an order. An off-topic and poorly Photoshopped entry is often awarded a Monkey prize (a random monkey-related booby prize).

Certain images recur in contest entries. "Brave Woman," the name of one such image, is a woman who originally appeared in conjunction with the Oct 22, 2004 Woot-Off, which began with sale of the "Ab Tilt Abdominal Exerciser with Backrest" and culminated with the sale of item titled “Brave Woman Adventure Kit”.

Statistics

Currently

As of October 26, 2006, Woot has over 500,000 registered users. Woot sold their 1,000,000th item, a 4GB micro hard drive, on February 5, 2007.

September 2005

On September 20, 2005, a post in the Woot Blog provided several statistics about Woot sales, including the following:

• On average, 62% of customers buy 1 of an item, 14% buy 2, and 24% buy 3.
• On average, 27% of sales occur in the first hour. The next highest sales (8%) occur at 7 am Central time.
• The top 5 states ranked by woots purchased per capita are:

1. — Nevada — 1:637
2. — Washington — 1:828
3. — Maryland — 1:865
4. — California — 1:876
5. — Utah — 1:893

July 2005

On July 26, 2005, a post in the Woot Blog provided several statistics about Woot customers, including the following:

• One wooter has purchased 338 products from 114 different woots.
• The top spender (a different user) has spent $16,285.62.

During a sale

During a sale, clicking on the "Product Stats" tab, or reading the first post in the product's forum page, will reveal:

• the "first sucker" to purchase the woot
• the "speed to first woot" purchase
• the "last wooter to woot"
• a quantity breakdown, how large a percentage of users bought one, two or three items
• the percentage of woot sold during each hour
• the purchaser seniority, how long they've been a woot member
• the purchase experience, how many woots each buyer has purchased previously.
• "Quality posts" — insightful comments or questions posted by Wooters about the product. (forum only)
• the purchaser experience for the particular .woot, how many woots each buyer has previously purchased from the particular domain

After a sale

After a sale, the item's page in the Woot's forum will usually list the above statistics plus:

• item quantity
• last order time
• "Woot Member to blame" (user who purchased the last item)
• order pace
• "Woot Wage" (a calculation of how much revenue Woot made per hour based on the order pace)

Podcasts

On every weekday, at the same time as products are announced, Woot.com also publishes a podcast. This podcast briefly describes the item up for sale, and features an often-humorous song or skit relating to the product up for sale. These podcasts are recorded by Matthew Shultz.

Songs/Skits of Note

There are several "special" podcast songs/skits that recur periodically. These include:

Podcast Mailbag

Occasionally, instead of the usual song or skit, the podcast features a "Podcast Mailbag" segment, where Matthew reads and replies to a piece of e-mail submitted to Woot.com. Both the listener's mail itself as well as Matthew's reply to it are often humorous and/or sarcastic in nature. These readings are accompanied by a piano melody, and previously ended with the phrase: "E-mails not answered on the air will probably not be answered at all; therefore, if you have an emergency, do not e-mail podcast@woot.com; instead, dial 9-1-1."

With the advent of SayNow, the Woot Podcast Mailbag has consisted of voicemails left by users using the SayNow system. Matthew plays the voicemails on the podcast, often with derisive and humorous comments. The podcast mailbag ending line has now become: "E-mail your comments or questions to podcast@woot.com, or click the goldenrod phone icon on the main page at woot.com for instructions on using SayNow to listen and reply to podcasts on your mobile telephone."

Sonic trivia quiz

A semi-periodic woot podcast where the podcast team "squish" together various sound clips so they are not to be readily identifiable. Then there is a competition to correctly identify each clip and what they all have in common. The winner gets a heartfelt congratulation and a prize of no monetary value.

Bag of Crap Song

On days when Bags of Crap are being sold (except during Woot-offs), the podcast features a "Bag of Crap" theme song.

"Woot-off Song" or "Theme for Wooting-Off"

While a Woot-off is running, a podcast featuring the "Woot-off Song" is run.

Thump-THUMP

Whenever a heart related product is sold (blood pressure or heart rate monitor, etc.) the song features a thump-THUMP rhythm and is sung in a recurring style.

Bluetooth the Pirate

Whenever a product related to the Bluetooth wireless technology is sold (Bluetooth USB adapters, cell phone headsets, etc.), a special song is featured. Sung by the crew of a pirate ship, this song tells the tale of "Bluetooth, the most fearsome pirate on the Seven Seas" and his many nefarious deeds. During the middle part of these songs, a lone voice of dissent among the crew speaks out, complaining that Bluetooth is a technology, and has nothing to do with pirates. The Captain always comes back with a smart rebuke.

Ferdinand Magellan

Whenever a product related to the Magellan company is sold (mainly GPS devices), a special song is featured. It always begins with the lyrics "Ferdinand Magellan, the Circumnavigator, He crossed the danged Meridians, He crossed the danged Equator..." One notable listener mailbag consisted of a teacher writing in to ask for the chords of the song, so that he could use it in his class.

Related services and applications

Community members have contributed back to the site by offering Woot-related services. One of the popular ones is an alert service called WootAlerts, which sends out email and SMS alerts when the next Woot product is listed. Others include a forum, wootswap, to swap Woot-purchased items, an Apple Dashboard widget, an IRC bot that spits out the product name, and other programs that monitor what item Woot is selling.

Woot's success has also spawned multiple competitors and similar businesses. Woot's One Deal a Day business model continues to be copied by sites such as Zazz and MidnightBox. Woot's only offshoot sales site is Woot Wine.

Criticisms

Despite its following, Woot has gone under intense criticism as proven in these examples.

Products

From time to time, Woot may roll out a product that might not sit well with some members of the community. Some of these include but are not limited to kitchen products and watches. Often, Woot might even criticize a product itself by giving it a nomination for "Worst Woot of ?? (year)," and can sometimes be found at the end of a woot-off.

Servers

Although Woot has proven to have strong servers, there are times that they can get strained. This always happens when a popular item comes up for sale on the site or during a woot-off. The criticisms include but are not limited to bogged down servers when a bag-of-crap comes up for sale. Regardless, if there is a run on an item, community members have reported frustration in that item's thread, of being "timed out" during the race to get at least one of that item.

Pricing

One of the major criticisms regarding Woot is that they don't include product prices in their blog after a sale ends regardless of mode. To this extent, community members have banded together to include pricing in the product forums.

Woot Wine's Business Model

Critics say that internet wine sellers, like Woot Wine, may be a flawed business model. Ground shipping commonly used for internet wine sales, does not guarantee maintenance of optimal temperatures for quality wines. As of August 2006, various state laws only allow delivery to thirty two states (and DC) while Woot only ships to the lower 48 states in normal cases. Woot, like all internet wine sellers, must be in compliance with state tax and liquor laws and therefore the wines are shipped directly by wineries to individuals. Shipping direct from the winery may also be done for practical rather than legal reasons.

External links

General

• Official website
• Woot Wine
• 7 March 2006 Woot-off statistics post
• Woot SMS text alerts (Mobile)

Reviews

• Reviews of Woot from Epinions.com
• PC Magazine

References

• Time magazine's "50 Coolest Websites 2005"
• PC Magazine site review
• Dallas Observer article
• Wall Street Journal article
• Motley Fool article
• New York Times article (Registration Required)
• National Public Radio All Things Considered interview with Woot writer Jason Toon and developer Luke Duff (Streaming Audio)