What is Woot!?

 

Shoppers of rare deals may have come across the online marketplace Woot.com. This Amazon affiliate with a very distinctive image offers daily deals and other shopping benefits to customers. The site’s logo, a puppet monkey, as well as style choices other marketplaces would stay away from certainly help Woot! stand out from the crowd.

 

Screenshot of woot.com

 

But is it good for your brand?

 

Founded in 2004 and based in Texas, Woot! Is a daily deals site offering discounts and special deals to customers. Amazon bought the company in 2010 and has been operating it as its affiliate for cheap deals ever since.

 

Woot sells a wide range of products (many of them discounted versions of Amazon listings), including kitchenware, electronics, shirts and sports gear. Some of these are timed deals, while others are available as long as Woot!’s supply lasts.

 

The marketplace often runs extra campaigns to help move their inventory. These include offers such as a Woot-off, which is a day-long shopping event consisting of previously unannounced deals, and the unpromisingly named Bags of Crap, where customers may buy a sealed box of random goods.

 

Screenshot of woot.com/about

 

This tongue-in-cheek style, along with community-building elements like polls, forums, jokes, trivia and funny messaging has certainly helped distinguish Woot! from other marketplaces selling discounted products.

 

The marketplace currently only ships to the US (excluding Hawaii and Alaska) and gets about 10.6 million monthly visits, which makes Woot! the 21st most popular marketplace in its category, Coupons and Rebates in the country.

 

Woot!’s net sales in 2023 amounted to $584.5 million, which generated around $50 million in revenue for the company.

 

Since Woot! belongs to Amazon, the cheeky marketplace is able to offer its customers all kinds of perks that the e-Commerce giant provides, like Prime shipping. Not to mention the peace of mind customers have knowing that their purchase from the unorthodox marketplace is backed by Amazon.

 

But did you know that the sharing between Amazon and Woot! goes both ways?

 

Most of us are familiar with the concept of retargeting: when you look at a product on an online marketplace, its ad will start following you around the internet, working to close the deal. But what if you look at something on Amazon and suddenly Woot! reaches out to you with an unmissable deal for the very same product?

 

This is exactly what happened to an Amazon customer. And while it’s great to get the same product for less money, the data privacy implications in this case are far more serious than saving a few bucks.

 

Is Amazon allowed to share your data with its affiliates? It probably is (it must be in the fine print somewhere, or, as Woot! refers to it, in the “Boring Stuff”), but are you OK with that?

 

Moreover, did you even know Woot! exists? (Why should you, unless your products are present on the US market?) And how many other unknown affiliates could be out there with full access to your data?

 

When you sell your products on Amazon, you trust the marketplace (and/or your authorized third party sellers) to treat them according to your agreement. But what if Amazon outsources your products to Woot!?

 

Is ending up in a Bag of Crap in line with your carefully built and invaluable brand image?

 

If you want to prevent that from happening, you have to keep a really close eye on your sellers and any online marketplaces worldwide where your products may pop up, authorized or unauthorized.

 

Or, alternatively, you can set up a comprehensive online brand protection program and let globaleyez deal with all that.

 

Our services, including marketplace monitoring and partner compliance detect unauthorized listings and non-compliant behaviour quickly and effectively. Whether on Woot! or any other of over 150 marketplaces worldwide, we find product listings that hurt your brand’s IP rights and take effective action against it.

 

Don’t let non-compliant and/or unauthorized sellers ruin your brand’s reputation and steal your revenue on Woot! or any other marketplace.

 

Contact us and let globaleyez take care of it.