Is Local.Woot! a fail?
I checked out Local.Woot! today and noticed that there were no votes on the sponsored deal of the day (so I upvoted it). I also looked at the leaderboard and noticed that @threepiecewoot was ranked 14th overall. All he has done is upvote 4 deals three months ago. That must mean that there has to be a very few number of people who actually use Local.Woot! http://local.woot.com/newyork/deals/users/threepiecewoot I felt bad for Local.Woot! so I asked a question. So do you think Local.Woot! will eventually lose its BETA badge or do you think that Local.Woot! will eventually be lost all together? By the way, this is based on the New York Local.Woot!
by
s21
asked 4 months ago
I'm still waiting for local.woot Kansas City. But I'm beginning to think that it's going to be a VERY long wait.
Maybe they should just turn it upside down to make it local.moofi
Ok, so the "c" and the "a" in "local" don't work quite as well as the letters do in "woot!" but you see where i'm going...
@wnyx585am: The 'c' works fine, the 'a' however looks kinda like a backwards 'e'
I gave up on local.woot a long time ago since I never saw anything interesting on it. Same goes for all the other similar sites. I just don't see the atraction. The rest of Woot!, though, is fantastic.
@mlutz3: Not sure how I thought the "c" would be messed up. Thanks for setting me straight...
It's just a crazy, mixed-up, upside down world out there...
I was hoping local.woot! would be a little more solid. I pop onto NY.Woot! every so often and ad my comments. But I know nothing about any other city. New York is a pretty solid market and if it isn't having much success there YET, then I can't imagine it doing well in other markets YET.
I hope it does work out though. Would love to see a Philly.Woot!
the mods try their hardest to drum up activity, they post questions and answer to anyone else that posts questions. i pop in every few months or weeks, but they're gonna need something to take them out of the shadows. like an exclusive deal with a viral tweet campaign or something. little gems like moofi does
I guess I'm just waiting around until local comes to my market. Never dawned on me to actually check out the deals in the other markets. Why if I can't partake? Guess I'm selfish like that....
I wouldn't know. There isn't a "Local.Woot" anywhere near my city.
I asked a similar question a couple of months ago. Answers? Six. None from staff. Doesn't seem to have much interest in the 4 cities. I've checked a few times. Yawn. Note: I don't live in or near any of the 4. Found that I was ranked in the top 20 in one of the cities. Really!?!
Still waiting here in Raleigh, NC
I think the problem is we just might not have very many wooters in those cities. If there was one near where I'm at I'd have a reason to pop in, but right now...
For me it is failed.I checked it out a few times and I luv all other woot sites, and I have bought several deals from groupon, living social, etc...but there are other sites that are better at showing all the available local deals.
As in the last thread, it's still a bunch of crickets for the most part in Seattle
@gmwhit: I go to Seattle quite a bit. I try and check the local site before I go... Haven't found anything I liked yet, though.
I've never bothered to go to local.woot, honestly. The only big city I ever lived near was Baltimore, and last I checked it wasn't a part of local.woot. Now the nearest one is Boston, and that's still a good two hour drive.
I'd actually love to see local.woot expand, but it would have to strike it huge in a lot of major cities before it could get to anything closer to smaller towns.
What might be a good idea is local.college.woot or just college.woot as a deals site for college towns. Shops and restaurants could get involved. Plenty of colleges have similar sites
the main problem with local.woot is that it's almost exclusively food deals. There are occasional lasik deals, comedy club deals, etc,. but a lot of repeats.. it needs something with more local flavor.. things people might want to act on, if they aren't foodies.. like i dunno - toys-r-us flash sales (or whatever is going on) or connecting with local vendors/tradesmen to offer services instead of just shopping.
Hard to say, really. i try to stay active because it's a vicious circle - new people might visit, but its a ghost town, and then they leave without participating.. but until people participate, it'll remain a ghost town.
Mainly i think the format is all wrong for a local deals page, at least until it grows.. fewer deals instead of a stagnant page of a bunch of items.. show us 3 or 4 at a time.
Also mix it up a bit.. get some of the non chain stores in on it... exclusive coupons, etc.
I live in the Seattle area but as I check Google Offers, Groupon, Living Social, and Amazon Local every morning, I have yet to see anything on local.woot that appeals to me that I haven't already seen on one of the other sites.
@theoneill555: agreed... a lot of the deals are funneled through those sites anyways - in ny its a lot of goldstar stuff... which is fine.. BUT woot has an opportunity to be a lot more than groupon and etc...
I'm thinking local tatoo shops, electronics shops, local bands, art galleries, seedy bars drink specials, etc something other than just food and anonymous groupon style deals.
Since I don't live near any of the local.woot cities, it was essentially DOA for me from day one.
I visit all the woot sites because there might be a killer deal on something that interests me. Since I would have to drive a minimum of 6 hours to take advantage of the closest local.woot deal, I don't even bother checking.
-1 for voting on a sponsored deal "because no had upvoted it yet"
Like most of you, I don't live anywhere near any local.woot city, so I can't say if it is a fail or not. I live near Atlanta, but I don't think that woot is coming here any time soon.
The space is just very, very crowded. Groupon, Living Social, and Google, are just a few of the players in this space. Unless woot brings something very different I don't expect it will be long for the world.
I find it funny that the local sites have the better crab cloud engine but nobody to enjoy it. LOCALIZE THE LOCAL ENGINE!
And yes, it is probably a total failure at this point, but I'm sure that Woot is thinking about how to make it work. They're awesome like that.
Suggestion: Instead of having Local be a specific part of a state, why not make it a wider range? Like, if I'm in Queens NY, why should I only see/add deals for Manhattan? Spread it out more!
I try to stay active on NY to try and show my support but do find the deals to be repetitive and all in the same area. Tons of hair/nails/spa stuff with comedy clubs being posted all the time. The same places seem to get re-posted a lot. I give credit to @slydon for putting effort into posting different questions trying to get some conversation going but unfortunately there is only a couple of people that make comments and usually its a day or 2 apart which does not lead to any back and forth.
Too bad so many people are turning a blind eye to it because it could really turn into an area that people could find out about a lot of interesting local joints.
I don't know, I'm never on it... Mostly because NYC is very far away.
hate to say it, but i'll give an honest answer to your question: all signs point to yes.
Just don't know if that market is really big enough with all the other options saturating it already. I imagine Local will go the same route as Happy Hour... still there, but effectively abandoned
Until it comes to Minneapolis, it's kind of moot for me to go there.
I'm HOPING the reason that local.woot has not taken off yet is because they are trying to contact numerous businesses in numerous cities.
Then again, they would probably post the deals as they go.
However, I hope they figure a way to integrate local.woot with deals.woot instead of having a separate site.
Although I'm far away from any of the local.woot cities, I do have family in St. Louis and have been meaning to check out the site. This thread was the nudge I needed to check it out, especially since nobody here mentioned anything about the StL site yet.
Well, not much to see... just reposts of deals from other deal sites and only a handful of deals were even on the top deals page. Most of them were buried under the fresh tab because nobody had voted for them yet. Kinda sad.
I voted up what I thought were some good deals. Clicked on "suggest a deal" and found that "suggest a city" was one of the choices, so I sent in a request for my area, then submitted an actual deal suggestion.
Different setup than here, it appears that you suggest a deal and then somebody has to review it before it gets posted.
My local is considered STL, which is still an hour away (at minimum). It would have to be an overwhelming deal before I'd hop in my gas guzzler to go get it. Besides, the deals are usually just rehashes of other things, like LivingSocial. I haven't even bothered to check it for a while..
since it isn't covering my local area (Buffalo, NY) yet I haven't checked in quite a while. I think it has potential to be successful if they begin to add markets
How long has it been around? It might be too soon to declare a failure, but since I don't know the answer to that first question, I couldn't say.
@raider9924: That is very true. The same companies have the exact same deals over and over again. Woot needs to invoke it's right to remove duplicates on local.woot ;)
Honestly, I don't think adding markets is the answer. The deals aren't appealing, they're repetitive, and they are easily found elsewhere. I think it is fundamental to the design, not an issue of markets. All local.woot is, is a place to take all the websites that produce local deals and put them in a list. I never thought that was a great idea. (But I understand everyone wants to see for themselves, but I have to say ...you ain't missin much). If you have groupon and living social for your area, then you have already have all the same stuff.
Need one in Indianapolis, when that day comes I'll weigh in. Just looks like an aggregate site for Living Social, Groupon, and other clone sites. Would be nice to see some exclusive deals, or at least some fun offers that aren't everywhere else on the web.
I'm tired of seeing spa, gym, and other similar offers.
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