Amazon Courts Impulse Shoppers, Snaps up Snarky Woot

Amazon Courts Impulse Shoppers, Snaps up Snarky Woot
Published on July 02, 2010 | Comments: 0
Online retailer Woot, one of the first websites to sell just one product at a time until the item runs out or until midnight of the next day, has been purchased by Amazon.

Terms of the agreement were not announced. Woot will continue to be run the way it has always been run, says CEO Matt Rutledge (via Sci-Tech Today), “with a wall of ideas and a dartboard.”

Woot, which calls itself “an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap,” has about 2.75 million registered users.

Snarky Business as Usual

Woot will remain substantially the same, wrote Rutledge in a memo to employees. “From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture. Nevertheless, don’t worry that our culture will suddenly take a leap forward and become cutting-edge. We’re still going to be the same old bottom-feeders our customers and readers have come to know and love, and each and every one of their pre-written insult macros will still be just as valid in a week, two weeks, or even next year. For Woot, our vision remains the same: somehow earning a living on snarky commentary and junk.”

Amazon Courts Impulse Shoppers

Amazon tends to be a destination source for people who know what they already want, while Woot is “about persuading you to buy something you didn’t even know you needed,” says Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst covering ecommerce for Forrester Research. The Woot deal will help Amazon attract shoppers that the company has so far not been able to capture, Mulpuru says.

Amazon has been Woot’s sole outside investor. Last year, Amazon purchased Zappos.com for $847 million, and in 2008 it purchased Audible for $300 million.