I was introduced to woot.com many months ago by my friend Brian Christensen, CEO of Simple Product Corp.. He's always on the lookout for cutting-edge concepts -- and woot.com fits that bill.
The concept behind woot.com is almost insane. They sell one product a day from their site. That's it. One product. When they sell out of the product, it's over. The lights are turned out and the door is locked. Well, sort of.
You see, they have created an amazing following of groupies. Woot is like e-commerce rock stars. They've harnessed several Web 2.0 components that are feeding their community with cleverly written morsels of edutainment. They have a robust community, podcasts about their products, a blog, Google Adsense (to bring in some extra cash), and they leverage RSS feeds to let users know about the next deals they're about to miss if they don't act now.
In an e-commerce world where everything is secretive, Woot actually tells you everything about their sales: How much they made on each product (the Woot Wage), the Order Pace, when they sold out, and the percentage of sales per hour. For instance, on December 23 their product was a Creative Zen Micro Photo 8GB Media Player for $49.99.
The "First sucker" (the first person to buy) was: kgutah.
The first unit was sold in 29.327 seconds after it was launched.
The "Wooter to blame for sellout" was: red300m.
The order pace was 37.271 seconds. (WOW!)
The "Woot Wage" was $4,829.48.
The total units sold, or "Total Woots" was: 900.
Talk about disruption of the old way of doing business. The typical retailer tries to stock as much product as possible and then hope like crazy they've got what you're looking for. Woot is the exact opposite. One product and they don't care if it's what you want. They know that if you're not going to buy what they have to offer someone else will.
Ingenious!
