deals.woot → faq

what is deals.woot?

If you have read that whole FAQ over there, and still have a problem/question you can write us

Welcome to Deals.Woot

About Deals.Woot

What is Deals.Woot?
No, really, what is Deals.Woot?
A place where wooters can share the latest intel about what’s cheap and where. A way for savvy, opinionated wooters to turn their rhetorical fire on everybody else’s deals for a change. An ever-flowing fountain of ecommerce champagne. If you want to discover an amazing deal, or tell the world about one you found, or just talk specs and prices with your fellow cheapskates, Deals.Woot is your playground.
Why is Deals.Woot?
Look at the 2 million people around you. No, not crowded around your desk – we mean around you virtually, at Woot. Over the last 6 years, these reasonably smart consumers have found their way here by word of mouth, a deal center, media coverage, or a tweet – and, of course, most are disappointed by what they find and never come back. But quite a few have stuck around. What are they all doing here? Submitting themselves to this peculiar daily ritual: figuring out whether some random item shoved in their face is something they might want to own before the wooter next to them buys it.
Who is Deals.Woot?
Starting at point B, are we? You might consider Point A as our original site’s faq here: http://www.woot.com/faq. In terms of content, while we have a small staff here in the Deals.Woot department, the site is largely the outcome of audience participation – you and your fellow wooters are Deals.Woot.
When is Deals.Woot?
East Coast wooters will be happy to hear that, for once, staying up until 1 am won’t help you much here. Deals.Woot employs a fancy schmancy social popularity algorithm to promote the deals that are getting the most buzz at any given time. So the deals that are going great blazes in the middle night won’t necessarily be any better (or even any different) than what’s popular at any other time of day. Enjoy the rest, East Coasties.
Where is Deals.Woot?
Ha ha. What, you think this FAQ is here for your entertainment or something? Move along now.
What is the "Sponsored Deals" section?

Sponsored deals are the closest thing to our old "Side Deals" except times 5 and with more staff love and care than ever. They are now more like “mini-woots”, with five new deals in this section every day. OK, yes, companies pay a little something to be Sponsored Deals. But we don’t allow just any old crap in this section. Sponsored Deals are proposed to us by other retailers, manufacturers, and even other daily deal sites. If we find the deal compelling enough that our members will appreciate us bringing it to their attention, we’ll feature it here. Within this section, it’s up to our community to rank these deals by voting on their favorite one or two deals of the bunch. This feedback helps us define which deals were well-received and which were crappy, and helps you share your opinion with other wooters.

If your store would like to be considered for this space, contact sponsor@woot.com for details. But if your deal is lame, or sketchy, no amount of money will let you buy your way in. Believe it or not, we have a reputation to uphold.

What is the "Community Deals" section?
It’s whatever you want it to be. Pretty much, anyway. This is where you find the deals that wooters like you have ferreted out and brought to light. We’re thinking it’ll turn into a massive database of discounted products from around the Web, constantly expanding to absorb the newest deals from the very moment their prices are slashed, with each deal immediately rated by hordes of savvy voters to spotlight the very greatest deals in the world today. Hey, we can dream, right? There are many search options and a highfalutin’ algorithm to view deals from this database from different perspectives, and each is detailed in its own question below:
What is the "Popular" tab on Community Deals?
The easiest or most passive way to find deals is to simply view the front page of Deals.Woot as items appear on the Popular tab, the default view of this section. Every 10 minutes or so, we scan all deals looking for signs of activity that represent a certain deal is getting a lot of positive attention. When a deal or multiple deals meet an activity threshold, they appear under the Popular tab on the front page of Deals.Woot. Success!
What is the "Fresh" tab on Community Deals?
This is where to find deals before they become Popular, and near-miss deals that never quite hit the big time. The Fresh tab is used to discover deals within their first 24 hours after entry, as sorted by Age, Votes, or Comments. By expressing your opinion via Votes, Comments, and Tattles you can help improve the platform’s accuracy as to what deals make the popular tab. With enough activity within 24 hours after being posted, a good deal will become popular, benefiting the lazy bums who only watch that tab. And they’ll probably never even thank you.
What is the "Ask the Community" section?
A leopard-print table saw? A robotic diaper pail? A cheap champagne fountain? If you’re looking for a deal that doesn’t appear to show up in our Community Deals section, throw the question to the Deals.Woot mob. Or answer a question for the Deals.Woot mob. Or vote for your favorite questions, or your favorite answers, or… maybe we should call this section “Ask, Answer, Comment On, And Vote In The Community”, but that won’t fit on the page.
Do I need a special account to use Deals.Woot?

Only if your existing Woot account is special, and they’re all special to us. But no, if you’re already a wooter, just sign in with your usual info. If you’re not, well, what’s the holdup? Once you’ve signed up for an account, your life will never be the same.

But you should know that only Woot accounts with at least one purchase will be able to vote on deals. We did this to prevent sellers from voting their own deals onto the front page with multiple sock-puppet accounts. We know it might seem like some dastardly scheme to force people to buy stuff from us, but it’s just to protect the integrity of the “Popular” deal status. If we were that crafty, we wouldn’t be peddling obsolete gizmos for your spare change.

  • A Preface from Matt Rutledge

Hey, look, the web has other stores. The crazy thing is that many appear to offer a SELECTION of different items ALL AT THE SAME TIME! And what’s even funnier is that dozens, maybe even hundreds of sites operate on this “multiple items at once” business model! And where are their community forums? Clearly these ghost-town “selection-based” stores are just a fad. It won’t last another six months.

So, of course, that’s a silly perspective – no one begrudges selection as a concept, right? Well, these last 5 years operating Woot, it’s been interesting to say the least, to hear how crazy we are not to offer more options. Hey, at our new dot-woot-store-a-year pace, we’ll be able to go toe-to-toe with the selection available at just a couple large ecommerce stores in a mere million years.

We were the first to pitch a tent in the daily-deal field, but many new and existing retailers are moving into town – and we’d like to welcome them. There are fresh daily-deal concepts from Amazon, BigLots, eBay, Newegg, Target, and ToysRus. And entire verticals of new sites for fashion deals, baby deals, green deals, tool deals, sports deals, watch deals, wine deals and many others. It’s like the classic product-based “Long Tail” is now made up of stores themselves. The irony is that the more event-based ecommerce sites that exist, the harder it is for any one of them to achieve critical mass and the more diluted the community experience is (if the retailer even offers one). Coming around full circle, my intro parody can be applied now to the proliferation of event based marketers: how can anyone keep track of and aggregate this huge selection of stores with tiny selections?

The answer: anyone can’t. But everyone, together, can. And that’s why Deals.Woot is here.

Crowd-sourced deal aggregation is not new. In fact, existing deal site communities are largely comprised of the very consumers who unwittingly (mwah-ha-ha) helped evolved the concepts behind Woot.com. Along with our active daily-visitor base, there are other areas of structuring and running a deal center that we already excel at. The work we do behind the scenes with manufacturers and retailers to identify their deal opportunities will definitely come in handy. Our direct relationships consulting with manufacturers and retailers – an element of Woot for 16 years, predating most of the web and all of ecommerce – will play a major role, too. Personally, I’m excited about further unification of our wholesale deal team with our public retail face, but that’s just the kind of thing I’m into.

Thank you in advance for previewing and participating in the new Deals.Woot platform. We welcome – nay, we demand – your suggestions as we will be making continuous changes to the structure here as we go along. (Don’t bother complaining about the color scheme, though!)

Matt Rutledge
Founder & CEO
Woot Inc.

Not a farewell, just a forced redirect.

It's true, Local.Woot is no longer, but please don't despair.

Never-ending savings are still to be found on Deals.Woot each and every day, so come on in. Don't think of it as a time for tears. Think of it as a way to bring us all closer together under one roof.

Sorry

This is only for people who have bought woots

We restrict voting to users who have purchased something from one of the other Woot stores. It's not just because we want your money (which we do) - it's the best way to be sure all the votes are coming from real people and not spam-bots or phony accounts. The best way we can think of, anyway. For now.

You can always get voting rights by buying something from one of Woot's other sites:

Purchases through Deals.Woot don't count, because in that case you're not buying anything from us. And we don't have your account information for those purchases.

If you think you've bought something from Woot before and still can't vote, make sure you're logged in with the same account you used to buy from us.

Geez, why so negative?

You have to vote up more before you can vote down.

Don't get us wrong. Negativity has its place. And downvotes are just as essential as upvotes when it comes to making Deals.Woot a useful place to find deals.

But when your votes lean so heavily toward the dark side, we have to wonder. Go vote up a few things. Accentuate the positive for a little while. It'll do you some good, and it'll do the site some good, too. Then you can get back to dealing out the smackdowns, OK?

Too late, we all heard you!

Hmm... you're wanting to take your vote back?

Well, that's a bit tricky. See, we do a lot of stuff with your vote, using it to work out the popularity of what you voted for, compare that to all the other things voted on, tally up our leaderboard, work out your reputation. Someday we'll do a little cartoon showing just how hard your vote is working.

Anyway, taking votes back messes all that up, so we give you five minutes, in case you just mis-clicked. After that we've got to say no take-backs. Luckily, votes are free, so feel free to throw them around left and right wherever you see fit.