@dave Thanks! We should just migrate to your forums since I think that’s where you fixed all the bugs that are left in ours.
@shawn why on earth are product forums created by events and not just when someone wants to start chatting about the product? So. Many. Events. It was like years ago when one of my old teams became obsessed with queues and made everything queues.
@dave@hyjinx@shawn When there was just one thing to talk about it made sense to automatically create the thread that people would definitely use to talk about it. But then it got complicated… or, as you put it…
@hyjinx As overwhelming as it became on the back end, it was equally overwhelming on the front end for customers. With all the added items TPTB insisted on thrusting down onto Woot, the site became “too much”. And thus, an exodus of customers.
(Looking at Google trends, that probably was the largest contribution to why shirt.woot sales are what they are now. The blanks, the print defects and CS at the time, and the number one volume artist setting up his own shop didn’t help either.)
@narfcake As you know, I’m a pre-acq Woot customer (and a SynMicro one before that! See the image!)
I also became overwhelmed by it. But more about the fact that many of the dailies weren’t compelling to me. But in my previous band “Out Like Pluto”, 100% of the tshirts I wore at shows were Shirt.Woot Pluto themed shirts from 2009-2011.
This is also the reason I stopped visiting Groupon Goods. It started with a few items at a time, which was good. Easy to look through and quickly decide if there was anything worthwhile. Then they opened it to Marketplace-type sellers and the lid blew off.
From a dozen or 20 items to hundreds and hundreds. Then the marketing games to hide the newest offerings so you had to sort through everything else to find it, forcing exposure to the full merchandise line. And their website infrastructure wasn’t designed for such a large quantity of items, so that added to the shopping frustration.
It only took me a few weeks to give up and leave GG behind. Since then they’ve improved the infrastructure, but the bloom was off the rose. I never looked back.
@snapster Perhaps they don’t really care what their customers have to say, or only the customers who had unhappy things to say were using their forums and it made Jeff sad.
@duodec that’s the enjoyably snarky answer. I think we could give them some credit for recognizing its not where mainstream Amazon customers were going anymore.
Even more broadly, it seems the mainstream internet user has decided just to accept that communication is either social media content or not worth saying.
@snapster Amazon turned off the discussions at the bottom of product pages a long time ago. I found those really useful. I guess they felt the Q & A format was better, where people could just ask if it’s compatible with whatever phone they have or the wall voltage of whatever country they live in without having to see that the question had already been answered a dozen times or more.
You’re allowed to say Woot! here.
@Thumperchick Don’t lie to us.
looks like a glitch:
Link
While they work to fix that, figured we could loan our forum out for any product discussion: https://meh.com/forum/topics/woot-discussion-ddd-home-1800-thread-count-cotton-rich-sheet-sets
@dave Thanks! We should just migrate to your forums since I think that’s where you fixed all the bugs that are left in ours.
@shawn why on earth are product forums created by events and not just when someone wants to start chatting about the product? So. Many. Events. It was like years ago when one of my old teams became obsessed with queues and made everything queues.
@hyjinx why on earth are there so many events?
@dave @hyjinx @shawn When there was just one thing to talk about it made sense to automatically create the thread that people would definitely use to talk about it. But then it got complicated… or, as you put it…
@hyjinx As overwhelming as it became on the back end, it was equally overwhelming on the front end for customers. With all the added items TPTB insisted on thrusting down onto Woot, the site became “too much”. And thus, an exodus of customers.
(Looking at Google trends, that probably was the largest contribution to why shirt.woot sales are what they are now. The blanks, the print defects and CS at the time, and the number one volume artist setting up his own shop didn’t help either.)
@narfcake As you know, I’m a pre-acq Woot customer (and a SynMicro one before that! See the image!)
I also became overwhelmed by it. But more about the fact that many of the dailies weren’t compelling to me. But in my previous band “Out Like Pluto”, 100% of the tshirts I wore at shows were Shirt.Woot Pluto themed shirts from 2009-2011.
@dave @mschuette @shawn Also, man I wish we had notifications on those forums. Maybe I’ll ask the CTO to prioritize it…
@dave @hyjinx @shawn I don’t know, I’ve heard stories about that guy.
@dave @hyjinx @mschuette @shawn
I like spooky stories.
Anyone up for a campfire?
@narfcake
This is also the reason I stopped visiting Groupon Goods. It started with a few items at a time, which was good. Easy to look through and quickly decide if there was anything worthwhile. Then they opened it to Marketplace-type sellers and the lid blew off.
From a dozen or 20 items to hundreds and hundreds. Then the marketing games to hide the newest offerings so you had to sort through everything else to find it, forcing exposure to the full merchandise line. And their website infrastructure wasn’t designed for such a large quantity of items, so that added to the shopping frustration.
It only took me a few weeks to give up and leave GG behind. Since then they’ve improved the infrastructure, but the bloom was off the rose. I never looked back.
While looking into that, I made an interesting discovery that Amazon had shut down its forums last November:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=14279661
didn’t do a robust search, but spotted a bit of discussion
@snapster Perhaps they don’t really care what their customers have to say, or only the customers who had unhappy things to say were using their forums and it made Jeff sad.
@duodec that’s the enjoyably snarky answer. I think we could give them some credit for recognizing its not where mainstream Amazon customers were going anymore.
Even more broadly, it seems the mainstream internet user has decided just to accept that communication is either social media content or not worth saying.
@snapster Amazon turned off the discussions at the bottom of product pages a long time ago. I found those really useful. I guess they felt the Q & A format was better, where people could just ask if it’s compatible with whatever phone they have or the wall voltage of whatever country they live in without having to see that the question had already been answered a dozen times or more.