Wine.Woot, Shirt.Woot, Sellout.Woot, Kids.Woot, and now Deals.Woot! Just in time for the holidays the team that basically invented deal a day shopping is expanding Woot-empire, and this time it is all about community… well… kind of. When you open the front page, roughly half of the screen above the fold is dedicated to sponsored deals - a moderated content provided by partners, so you judge how community friendly Deals.Woot really is. ;-)
Overall the site has a neat design and somewhat resembles Digg. Adding your own deal is easy and takes just a few mouse clicks. Interestingly that voting is restricted only to the members who have ever purchased anything from any of the Woot properties. Here is how Woot explains the restriction:
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.
When you submit a deal it is placed into the ‘Fresh’ list and will sit there until it gets promoted to the ‘Popular’ list based on deal activity and some other black magic. The FAQ doesn’t disclose how this exactly happens but one can guess that number of votes, clicks and comments gets involved.
In addition there is also a discussion area which is envisioned to be the place to go if you need a ‘deal question’ answered. Right now, since the site just launched, it is filled with questions related to the website functionality. You can find members bitching about expired deals and other typical ‘deal site’ stuff.
The sole most valuable asset Deals.Woot possesses is the active community of Woot admirers, many of whom are core bargain hunters. It is not unusual for a single deal to gather 50-60 comments, the only other deal site I know that can challenge Woot in this regard is SlickDeals.
I will be curious to see how well it fairs in the coming months. For some reason it reminds me of the first wave of social deal sites that launched in 2006. Not all of them have survived. What do you think, does Deals.Woot have a chance?
Related: Digg For Bargains: Deals.Woot Is Now Open To The Public (at TechCrunch)
They are just offering another variation to grab more revenue from there existing user base. They are really not adding any VALUE to the process itself, or adding any orginality. (I always like something new)
I know a site (Cash Back) that is intend on launching a deal of the day addition to Cash Back, More product based I am interested to see how they can manipulate the system to fit that format