w00t! One Day, One Deal... But Is It A Good One?
Written: Dec 17 '06
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I was fiddling around totally lost on the net one day when I stumbled upon Woot.com quite by accident. Woot, named for the slang term w00t! (usually indicating excitement or joy) that sprung up sometime in the 90's on the Internet, is a site that advertises "One Day, One Deal."
What is Woot All About?
The gist of the site is that each day a new "Woot" is posted, starting at midnight CST. The items vary greatly, from small electronic gadgets to huge widescreen televisions. You can pay as little as a few bucks for a "Woot", or you can pay several thousand dollars. Each day when you check the site, you don't know what you're going to find. Usually, products are sold at a great discount, and frequently great deals sell out completely before the day is finished.
This whole concept seems to intrigue people greatly.
Items ship for a $5 flat fee, no matter the size.
The Cult Following
Woot has a bit of a cult following of people who love to see what's new every single day. People discuss the day's Woot in the discussion forums, where pricing from other sites is quoted for comparison purposes after the Woot is posted. In the midst of the usual "This Woot sucks!" types of posts, you'll often find good buying or decision making advice. The best contributions are filtered and summarized at the top of the thread.
Woot Twists
Woot wouldn't be content to just do the same thing every day, so there are certain twists to the Woot experience.
One such twist is known as a "Woot Off". Every few weeks, Woot advertises products until they sell out, and then they advertise the next one. They often pull from the remaining stock of previous Woots, and the whole site seems to whip into a frenzy, particularly in the forums where 90% of the posts complain "Woot killer!" about an item that people think won't sell out for hours. The "Woot Off" lasts for a pre-determined amount of time that isn't announced, and then the site goes back to it's "One Day One Deal" model.
During a Woot Off, flashing lights and an indicator bar shows you how much stock remains of the current item being sold. When the inventory is low, the "I want one!" button to buy the item starts to bounce a little bit.
Woot will occasionally sell mystery bags, known as "Bags of Crap" during a Woot Off. For a low fee, they send you a small assortment of different items. People have gotten great things in a BoC, but I have yet to purchase one.
Woot also does "Two for Tuesdays" where they sell two of an item at one price. And they feature wine now, on it's own site at wine.woot.com.
So that's a brief overview of the "culture" behind Woot.
Navigating the Site and Making Purchases
Getting around on the site is fairly easy. Since there's only one item, and it's only up on the main page, you don't have to drill down to find what you're looking for. If what you want isn't on the front page, then Woot can't help you that day.
If something you do want is on that front page, then you simply click on the "I want one!" button to make your purchase. You must register for an account at Woot in order to purchase items from the site. Once you do, you can complete your purchase with either a credit card, or using Paypal.
The processing time varies, and during a Woot Off can take awhile, but I've never had any problems getting confirmation of my purchases. Once you've made your purchase and get your confirmation, your Woot should arrive within just a few days.
To date, I have purchased three "Woots". The first one was a Kensington Wireless Optical USB Desktop for Mac, for $29 + $5 S&H. It currently retails on Amazon.com for $67.
My second Woot was a refurbished SanDisk 512MB MP3 player for $19 + $5 S&H. New ones sell for about $10 more.
My most recent Woot was a Logitech Wireless Music system for $39 + $5 S&H. The best price I've found for it elsewhere is $49 from Amazon.com.
All three purchases arrived quickly, as advertised and working fine. It's a good thing too, because Woot is not known for their customer service. In fact, they make it very clear on their site that you pretty much are out of luck. In fact, they tell you that themselves right on their website:
From Woot.com's FAQ
Will I receive customer support like I'm used to?
No. Well, not really. If you buy something you don't end up liking or you have what marketing people call "buyer's remorse," sell it on eBay. It's likely you'll make money doing this and save everyone a hassle. If the item doesn't work, find out what you're doing wrong. Yes, we know you think the item is bad, but it's probably your fault. Google your problem, or come back to that product discussion in our community and ask other people if they know. Try to call the manufacturer and ask if they know. If you give up and must return it to us, then follow on to the next FAQ entry.
The next FAQ entry pretty much says to return the item to the manufacturer if it's defective. They then reluctantly give up a Woot.com email address to mail for RMA numbers if you must return your item to Woot.com, but they sure don't instill warm fuzzies about it.
Criticisms of Woot
Well, first there's the unapologetically lousy customer service guarantee. That's my biggest criticism of the site.
Other people feel that Woot plays up the impulse buy mentality, encouraging customers to buy without doing their research first, for fear of the product selling out while they research it. This is true in a way, but I find that the Woot forums always contain several useful links to the product elsewhere, including links to reviews on Amazon.com when available. Several times I have found something that seemed like a really neat deal, and then checked out the forums only to find it got lousy reviews on the Internet. Woot may put you in a time crunch and force you to make a relatively quick decision, but you they usually provide plenty of ways for you to educate yourself about that purchasing decision in a very short time.
Finally, the biggest Woot fans on the forums complain most often about the repetiveness of some of the Woot deals. Woot seems to heavily favor iPod gear, which gets the non-iPod people all in a huff. And they do like to sell Roombas, which gets the people who already have Roombas in a huff.
At a rate of one item per day, you can't please all of the people all of the time. In fact, you can't often please most of the people. But as Woot makes clear in their customer service policy, they're not about pleasing people. They're about advertising one thing at a time at a very low price.
Summary
Woot.com is a nifty concept, but caveat emptor. Buying from Woot may not always be a wise move. I would never buy a big ticket item from Woot because of their customer service attitude, but for small gadgets I think it can be a great resource. Just make sure not to fall for the hype and impulse buy things that you don't need. It's tempting, but if you approach Woot with the right attitude, I think some great deals can be had.
Woot
http://www.woot.com
Recommended:
Yes
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mrs-j
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