Woot is many things to many people.  The word has deep, geeky roots, but is now used by nearly anyone who has the internet.  The Urban Dictionary’s definition is

Woot originated as a hacker term for root (or administrative) access to a computer. However, with the term as coincides with the gamer term, “w00t”.

“w00t” was originally an truncated expression common among players of Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game for “Wow, loot!” Thus the term passed into the net-culture where it thrived in video game communities and lost its original meaning and is used simply as a term of excitement.

Most people just use the term as defined in the last line, a term of excitement.  Then comes one of the web based stores that kind of changed internet retailing, Woot.com.

If you want the actual information on the site, check out the Wikipedia entry, but a quick synopsis is, one item is sold per day, if it sells out, wait till tomorrow.  This was kind of a unique business model when it started and there have been dozens of copy-cat websites, none have been able to capture the fanatical fans that Woot has though.  Items being sold are usually that of a tech nature, although coffee makers and electric razors show up, but Woot is famous for two other sales pitches that they do on a regular basis.  The bag of crap is a $5 grab bag, most are unique, limited to three per purchase and a $5 shipping fee.  Rumors go in the forums that people have received everything from a few ink pens worth about 15 cents to a 42” plasma.  The bag of crap doesn’t come up nearly as much as it used to, but it almost always sells out in less than 3 minutes.  Ironically, the new items are listed on the site at midnight Texas time, where the company is based.  The other sales stunt that helped boost visibility is the Woot off, an all day sell out of random items.   There is no official word on how much of each item, but the Woot off will go for about 24 hours and is the only time the site deviates from the one item, one day business model.

Since no insight is given by the company as to what the next days item will be, or in the case of a Woot off, what the next item up will be, it keeps fans [customers] coming back daily, often times more than daily.  This unique business model leads to thousands of comments on each item and an above average chatter in the forums where fans discuss current and past items.

With this in mind, and the Web 2.0 bubble growing, it wasn’t long before the Texas based company was prone to getting a phone call from a major corporation about buying them.  Sure as shit, it happened this week when Woot announced a partnership with Yahoo.  Yahoo has been struggling to figure out exactly what the fuck they bring to the customer experience on the internet for years, in my opinion at least.  Their front page is so cluttered, their email is prone to spam and their failed attempt at an auction site are in my eyes, just a way to try to be too big.  If they would focus on just a few core offerings and be really good at them, they may have not been over-run by Google, who was much slower and methodical with how they released new services and offerings to their users.

All that, and now they will be trying to do the one product, one day business model with the help of Woot.

Ironically enough, the new service is poised to be called Sellout.Woot.  In typical Woot humor and satire, they have explained what is going on, sort of, in a recent blog posting on their site, Woot sells out.  While I’ve still never purchased anything from Woot, I have enjoyed watching the site from time to time and if you need to kill 10 minutes, reading the comments on any given day should be enough to get a chuckle out of ya and keep you entertained.  I’m only hoping this doesn’t change as Yahoo looks over their shoulders.

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