Like a twisted ankle without a cold compress, our membership rolls
just keep on swelling. Frankly, we’re getting tired of explaining the
Bag O’ Crap to our Great-Aunt Agnes, and reminding the other guys in
our gun club to check Wine.Woot. But hey, their ignorance is not their
fault. Even the oldest, savviest wooters might have overlooked some
corner of our vast Terra Wootcognita. So consider this a kind
of Woot for Dummies. (“Dummies”, of course, means “people who don’t
spend their entire day on Woot”. Don’t hate them – pity them.)
Woot-Offs:
About once a month or so, we depart from our “one day, one deal” setup
in favor of “two or three days, many deals”. When a deal sells out, we
replace it with a new one immediately instead of waiting until
midnight. And lo, we call it a Woot-Off, and it is good. You can tell
if a Woot-Off is going on by the flashing orange construction lights on
our front page and the slowness of our servers. To maximize your
Woot-Off enjoyment, make sure you have no other life to speak of.
The “Product Stats” Tab:
Click on this tab on the front page for a wealth of useless, nerdy data about each day’s
sale. Find out who was the first to buy one, how the sales broke down
hour-by-hour, how long the purchasers have been wooters, how many units
were sold (if we’re sold out), and more. Far more. Why would you want
to know all this? That’s your problem. No, we won’t tell you how many
are left while the sale is still going on. That wouldn’t be much fun,
now would it?
Discuss This Product: Every
day’s woot is accompanied by a forum discussion, where wooters offer
opinions and ask questions about that day’s deal. (They also do a lot
of other unseemly, irrelevant things, all of which our moderators try
to delete so things stay on-topic.) Wondering whether today’s woot is
Linux-friendly, or dangerous to your household pets, or delicious on a
bed of Spanish rice with a mole poblano drizzle, or just worth buying?
The daily discussion is the place to call on the wisdom of the herd.
And all of these discussions are archived in our Woots forum for future reference or future complaining.
Wine.Woot: In case you hadn’t heard, we also run a website featuring a new wine deal every week.
Yes, we agree it seems like a weird idea, if by “weird” you mean
“totally awesome.” The prices are the usual Woot bargains, and the
wines represent some of the finest small wineries in California,
Washington, and Oregon. With any luck, your state is one of those that
allows you to receive wine shipments, and you can soon hoist a glass
with the rest of us. No, none of the wines are refurbished. Yet.
Your Daily Wootcast:
Five days a week, our own exclusive podcast team composes an original
song or some other bit of audio weirdness for your advertainment
pleasure. Frequently catchy, occasionally funny, sometimes poignant and
usually under three minutes, these weird nocturnal emissions would
contend for the E-Commerce Grammy every year, if there was one. Our
podcast team is way too talented to keep working for us, so hear it
while you can. You can find the Wootcast on the front page every
weekday, or subscribe to it in iTunes via our RSS feed (http://www.woot.com/blog/rss.aspx).
Weekly Contests:
If you’re one of them Photoshop-type guys or dolls, you should know
about our weekly contests. Every Friday morning at midnight, we
announce a new contest theme on our blog.
Contestants then have the weekend to create their entries and post them
to the discussion board. The best part: the three entries we like the
most win prizes of $100, $50, or $20. But don’t do it for the money,
because mathematically speaking, you’ll probably be disappointed. Do it
for the love of kerning.
Bag O’ Crap: As you’d expect, this occasional woot
includes a bag and some crap. For real, we’re talking about random junk
that we couldn’t get rid of by any rational means. We don’t even tell
you what kind of crap you’ll get. And confounding all conventional
wisdom about human behavior, the kids just love it – the BOCs typically
sell out in, like, five minutes. It’s nuts. We’re scratching our heads
all the way to the bank.
Side Deals: What
do you do when you come to Woot all het up to spend some money, and
we’re sold out? You check out our Side Deal at the top of the page,
that’s what. Like our regular Woot deal, there’s a new one every day.
Who knows? Someday, it might actually be something worth buying.
Hope
that helps turn you on to some new aspects of the precious,
multifaceted jewel that is Woot. Even more Woot trivia is available on
the Woot Wikipedia page
(not maintained by us, of course). Many of these features were
implemented in response to ideas, suggestions, demands, and threats
from wooters like you. Got a favorite Woot feature? Or an idea for a
new one? We’re all ears. God knows we need the help.
