Woot

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	approx. $40 million annually
Number of employees	25-30
Website	www.woot.com

Woot is an Internet commerce company based in the Dallas suburb of Carrollton, Texas, which operates a website of the same name. Founded by electronics wholesaler Matt Rutledge, the site debuted on July 12, 2004, with a unique business model, offering a single discounted product per day, instead of the wide range of choices available through traditional online retailers such as Amazon.com. Woot’s novel, irreverent approach quickly attracted a robust community of customers, who share their opinions on the site’s community forums. Product selections tend to emphasize (but are not limited to) computer components and electronic gadgetry, all sold at closeout prices.

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, seven days a week, 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 (described below). Products are never announced beforehand and often sell out in a few hours or even minutes of frenzied buying. 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 buy up to three of the day's item. 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. Woot does list how many products were available after they are sold out.

Shipping is a flat rate of $5.00 per order, regardless of quantity of items purchased, size and weight of purchase, or shipping destination (as long as the destination is in the continental United States).

Marketing style

The company’s marketing style runs counter to conventional wisdom in other ways. Typically, product descriptions will 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.

Special events

Woot often has special sales 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. The actual percentage of product remaining is also visible in the Woot-Off's html source code.

During a Woot-Off, each product is replaced by a new product within a few minutes after selling out, until the end of the Woot-Off, when a regular product is listed for the remainder of the day. Woot-Offs often feature items that did not sell out during regular Woot sales, often at lower prices than originally offered. New (unique) items are also interspersed throughout the Woot-Off, along with popular items like Bags of Crap and Mystery Brand speakers, presumably to maintain constant interest and surprise.

Since the next item in the Woot-Off will not be listed till the current item is sold out, posters in Woot's forums occasionally use peer pressure to advocate the purchase of the current item. Often members will boast of buying the current item just to advance the Woot-Off. It should be noted that during Woot-Offs, many forum members deviate from posting an honest critique of the product and instead pump the offering, hoping readers will quickly buy an inferior Woot and advance the Woot-Off to the next listing.

Bag O’ Crap

In lieu of typical product sales, Woot occasionally offers the “Bag O’ Crap” (or “BOC”), a blind grab bag that includes dollar store items and can also randomly include more expensive electronics items. The BOC is marketed as one bag and shipping worth $5.00, and up to three "craps" costing $1.00 each. Orders are recommended purchased in quantities of three craps to minimize the percentage cost of shipping and maximize the probability of getting something of greater value. The "BOC" typically sells out within minutes of furious ordering.

Officially, the Bag of Crap is sold under the title of "Random Crap." Indeed, Woot's Bags of Crap most often arrive in a box, not an actual bag. Woot has also used the "Random Crap" moniker in more targeted sales, such as a random selection of desktop and wall calendars. Thus, a "true" Bag of Crap is only denoted by the presence of "Random Crap" in the product title without any other descriptive notation.

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 "Bride of Chucky" or "Beverage of Choice." A similar phenomenon occurs when a user types "refurb," which filters to "refurb (rox0rz!)," a nod to the controversial popularity of refurbished woots.

Launch Event

On a few occasions, 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".

Photoshop contests

Woot also offers Photoshop contests every weekend, with cash prizes going to the top 3 entries. The worst photoshopped entry is often awarded a "screeching monkey" 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 sale of the "Ab Tilt Abdominal Exerciser with Backrest."

Statistics

Currently

As of February 2, 2006, Woot has nearly 300,000 registered users.

September 2005

On 20 September 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:

— Nevada — 1:637
— Washington — 1:828
— Maryland — 1:865
— California — 1:876
— Utah — 1:893

July 2005

On 26 July 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)

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 always end 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."

Bag of Crap Song

On days when Bags of Crap are being sold, the podcast features a "Bag of Crap" theme song.

So first we take a bag

An ordinary bag

A plain old everyday type bag

There's nothing special about the bag

And then we take some crap

Just some regular old crap

A kind of crappy sort of crap

And we put it in the bag

(chorus)

B-A-G of C-R-A-P

Yes, we start with just a bag

An ordinary bag

A plain old everyday type bag

There's nothing special about the bag

And then we take some crap

Just some regular old crap

A kind of crappy sort of crap

And we put it in the bag!

(chorus)

Woot-off Song

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

Get out'a the way, we got a woot-off

We're piggin' out down at the Woot trough

Ain't gonna stop until the

Woot-off is done

You figure you get one woot per day

And if it's junk, well, that's just the way

But now an avalanche of Woots is released

And where there once was famine we feast

It's givng me an F5 complex

Refreshing just to see what's up next

Checking back to shop for what's new

I don't want it, but I hope that you do

'Cuz a new item won't come up

Until all of these are gone

Those are the rules of the Woot-off

We're piggin' out down at the Woot trough

Ain't gonna stop until the

Woot-off is done

Now there's another item online

A cell phone with a weird-ass design

How will this thing ever sell out?

This could start a new item drought

Who would ever buy this dumb thing

The Woot-off is so frustrating

I'm posting in the blog to decry

this thing you couldn't pay me to buy

Well you can ridicule and signify it

But someone's gonna have to buy it

Those are the rules of the Woot-off

We're piggin' out down at the Woot trough

Ain't gonna stop until the

Woot-off is done

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 came back with a smart rebuke.

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 to swap Woot-purchased items, an Apple desktop 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. Sites that have tried to copy Woot's business model include snapgone (out of business), 1deal1day (out of business), dailydeal (out of business), brandlet (out of business), Steep and Cheap, MidnightBox.com, GoingToday, Daily Zort, and Splooze (out of business). Due to some of these sites spamming Woot's forums in the past and also pretending to be Woot staff members, mentioning any one of these sites in the Woot forums will lead to the post being filter-changed. Although some Woot-inspired sites bear striking resemblance to Woot.com in both design and substance, Woot does not operate any offshoot sales sites, regional or otherwise.

External links

General

Articles

Related services and applications

Podcast