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The Wonders of Woot The next big idea in online retailing is happening in the wee hours of the morning. By Thomas Mucha, January 06, 2005 Are you awake at midnight? You should be. That's when Woot -- the hottest online retail concept/gimmick in a long time -- works its weird magic. You certainly won't be alone. Thanks to a 33-year-old businessman in Dallas, each morning more than 10,000 people are racing to their computer screens hoping, praying, and competing to be the next proud owners of a heavily discounted Apple/Hewlett-Packard iPod, Braun Flex XP rechargeable electric shaver, or Dinotronic remote-control T-Rex. Here's how it works: Woot sells just one item each day. One. It's usually, but not always, some consumer electronics gadget. It posts that product at midnight, Central Standard Time. When the item sells out -- at a price that's, on average, a third lower than retail -- the game is over. But here's the fun part: Nobody knows just how many are up for grabs. Enter intrigue. "In a shopping world where everything is available everywhere 24/7, the thrill of getting something with limited availability is a real point of distinction," says Wendy Leibmann, president of New York-based consultancy WSL Retail. "It sort of builds on the concept of the pop-up store: Now you see it, now you don't." What the website is seeing is a lot of traffic. According to the company's founder and CEO, Matt Rutledge, Woot gets about 100,000 hits a day and has seen exponential growth since its July launch. The holiday season was good for Woot too, bringing with it a few 200,000-hit days. "We were savvy enough to know people would be doing some holiday shopping," Rutledge says. To cater to this consumer segment, many of the site's December offerings were hot or useful gift items, such as Robosapien ("Half my shopping is done, thank you Woot!" posts one of the site's happy bloggers) and Cuisinart's brushed stainless power blender ("The wife will love this," another writes of his purchase). "We're on pace to do $10 million in revenues this year," Rutledge says. With just six Dallas-based employees, Woot is even making a little bit of money. The story of Woot begins with just a URL. The term itself -- a combination of the words "wow" and "loot" -- comes from the gaming community. "I used to play a lot of EverQuest back when I had the time," Rutledge says. So he bought the URL and then came up with an idea for it. Since Rutledge already owned a consumer electronics wholesaler in Dallas, Woot was a natural fit. "There's a constant flow of products coming through here on the wholesale level," he says. "Woot is an extension of that on the retail level." It's also a damn good marketing idea, because it's so infectious. How hard can you argue with any company that can sell a "Bag o' Crap"? (For a change of pace, Woot in August offered a $1 mystery gift, which turned out to be a toilet bowl brush, a concrete yard monk, and other "completely randomized items.") But what's really cool about Woot is its dedicated community of users who prattle on about each day's item -- the pros, cons, pricing, and just about everything else, including doctored photos of people "using" their products. It's the kind of brutally honest loyalty that only bloggers can create. There's plenty of humor too. Rutledge's dry sense is apparent throughout the site. (Here's Woot's witty description of a recent offering -- an FIC Ice Brick PC system: "FIC's Ice Brick is even smaller than the Ice Cube you've seen here before, and smaller still than the Ice Cube you saw in Anacondas.") Toss in the excitement of making an ultraquick purchase decision ("Do I need to be playing with a remote-control plastic T-Rex? At 50 percent off retail, do I even care?") and we've got a winner here, folks. Who knew shopping at midnight could be so much fun? Rutledge won't say what's in store for Act II, though he hints that an announcement is coming in late spring. He needs to act fast. Already, Deal.com offers a daily item on which it drops the price every 15 minutes. Even at Woot's mere $10 million in revenue, imitators are coming.