Woot Product Discussions for April 5th

@dave An acronym I learned a few years for shirts: CVC, which stands for chief value cotton. What it means is that cotton makes up more than 50% of the fibers – usually a 60/40 versus 50/50.

@dave @narfcake this kind of industry-insider jargon is rich, luscious and satisfying.

@dave bought one! Thanks! They’re great for storing Amazon Prime or Spotify music for playing offline. Although the new version was going for $25 before Christmas.

@dave I just grabbed one for the toddler to destroy.

@dave @Thumperchick These are cheaper than a toddler-proof case.

Ah, looks like you all got the last ones, sold out now.

@dave Now I’ll have two unopened Fires in a drawer. Yay?

Ah, they updated with $40 16GB 2016-model tablets. Doesn’t feel as much like an instant buy, but probably quite a bit better performing:
https://computers.woot.com/offers/amazon-fire-hd-8-2016-16gb-tablet-27

@sammydog01 You may want to check to make sure Amazon didn’t flag it for some stupid reason. From time to time, there have been folks complaining about not being able to register them because Amazon flagged them as being lost or stolen, and the CS was too clueless to know that Woot is their own subsidiary and refuse to help.

@narfcake Thanks- I’ll check it when it comes in.

@dave Dang. Kinda wish I had read this before I hit the road this morning. I’d have bit for a couple at that price.

@ruouttaurmind Me, too. Darn.

@narfcake @sammydog01 Story time!

While working at Woot/Amazon, I once got the infamous ? email (or at least got a forward of it) from Bezos.

A customer had gotten an Amazon email pointing them to a Woot deal. My team had set this up and sent it. All good so far. However, we’d typo’d the url and so the link was broken. This is very bad.

After getting the broken email, a customer called into Amazon CS, worried that this was spam, or a phishing scam. So the customer support agent reassured them it was real and apologized for the error, right? Nope. They said they’d never heard of Woot and had no idea why that customer would’ve gotten that email, and advised they change their Amazon password, reasonably freaking out the customer, who then wrote in to jeff@amazon.com with a big WTF.

Jeff Bezos sent a ? to head of worldwide retail Jeff Wilke who sent it to a few level 10 managers, who sent it to an army of level 8 managers, one of whom sent it to me with a “fix this” note.

So I got to go meet with the head of Amazon email, with a detailed explanation for how it was possible we typo’d a url (he was extremely nice about it), and then I got to meet with the head of customer support to explain that Woot was actually part of Amazon, and it’d probably be good for customer support agents to know the Amazon subsidiaries, or at least know to ask about it if it came up.

@dave Gee, at least you got to make a lot of new friends.

@craigthom @ruouttaurmind Not quite the same, but these might do the trick:

Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7 Tablet 2nd Gen 16GB (Refurbished) for $17.99

@lichme Thanks for the tip. Too bad my Prime expired last week.

Also, Amz is offering pretty decent discounts on new, current gen Fire and Kindle tabs for Prime members. Combine with a discount for paying a portion of your purchase with Amex points and it’s like they’re giving them away. A brand new HD 8 is $25 if you pay with at least $1 in Amex points.

Woot is also offering the HD10 (2015 edition) for $40 for 16GB. Possibly a better value considering the 7 inch you link is the 2012 edition, plus the larger screen size on the 10.

@lichme I would have chipped in the extra 3 bucks for the 16 HD over the 8 gb. Oh well. At least mine is fuschia. It won’t get lost on the floor.

@ruouttaurmind Someone was sad they missed a cheap Paperwhite. Was it you? $40 on Woot.

@sammydog01 Yup, I would have grabbed the $40 paperwhite. I’m actually angling with my former roommate to renew our Prime Household membership, thereby saving Woot! shipping, plus being able to take advantage of the big Amz discounts on Fire tablets so I can send one for Mommies day.

@sammydog01 Dang it. Sold out!

@ruouttaurmind

@medz Much less than before, but it still happens – hence why @snapster got a +1 to his Quality Posts yesterday.

@narfcake I used to comment on products I had knowledge of, but nobody seems to care. If people do ask a question and I respond, I never know if they even see my response.

@medz Yeah, there’s a lot of “didn’t come back” there. I think some folks presume that they will get an email to any replies, which doesn’t happen there, so they don’t come back.

@medz I used to post every night for years, I can’t remember the last time I did.

@ConAndLibrarian I recall that as well. Several times you’d post right before/after I did with the same info, and since there was no delete, I’d have to edit and link to different, less relevant content. Good times.

@lichme @dave Not to mention the number of shirts I post … uh, everywhere. Sure, I’ll add ?ref=meh_com as a suffix, but that’s only to track where link was, not to generate any commissions.

Likewise, I seem to post a good number of shirts from TT also. Are they still doing affiliate programs too?

@lichme another option is to have a method highlighting that users can plug in their own.

That thought takes me back to my being bummed that people don’t care about picking up pennies though. We added affiliate to deals.woot because there just wasn’t any glory leading a rebellion of people shrugging.

@lichme Last I looked, it seemed like they wanted you to have an established web presence to join. Can anybody join?

@lichme @medz assuming they still have someone manning the approval requests from Commission Junction, generally yes. I bet they scan for NSFW / controversial content on the site you provide. They might also need you to be located in an affiliate friendly state, though perhaps due to sales tax collection deals Amazon is less concerned with that these days.

I bet they scan for NSFW / controversial content on the site you provide.

@snapster Aw, fuck. I guess that rules meh out.

https://www.woot.com/minions for those interested.

Would be good to hear back from those applying - I think we could work out how to allow use of those links in any Woot discussion threads here.

@medz @snapster Anybody can request to join. Woot recently switched (back) from Rakuten to CJ after being off of that network for a year or two. I don’t think CJ is as strict as Amazon Affiliate program as far as who gets approved. There is a minimum payment amount before you’d see any cash (not sure what it is now, used to be $25). That amount is restricted by CJ, and not Woot. If you have other advertisers linked in CJ, any commission made across vendors all goes towards the minimum. I’m not sure that there are any location restrictions, unless they are imposed by CJ, since they are the ones paying you.

Woot Payout is: 2% tech, 4% everything else (except wine/gourmet, which is nada)

To hit the minimum, you’d need to sell $625 worth of stuff via affiliate links, or $1250 worth of tech stuff.

Also, for the sake of keeping it easy, you’d probably want to deep link your sales rather than direct link them. Essentially, it means using a single referral url and tagging the product url as a variable (Example: https://products.wootstalker.com?url=https://www.woot.com/offers/ddd-home-1800tc-cotton-rich-sheet-sets). Otherwise it’s a lot more work.

It should also be noted, your payment isn’t taxed, and paying taxes on it requires you to add extra forms/pay extra $ during tax time, so it may not be worth it for most people.

@lichme yeah, basically the same reason “cash back” systems fail is that it’s like walking past a penny because it’s a hassle to pick it up.

So, why aren’t we using your referral code?

@lichme @snapster

I know that many people feel that GPT sites are a waste of time, because even if you don’t do offers which require personal information, most of the other things are usually not worth much.

On one site I used to frequent, people were able to do quite well (especially with surveys/tasks from a third party site, even though the tasks were pennies (they offered REALLY nice bonuses)) for spare time.

It’s kind of how people feel about MTURK. Many people feel that doing a task for pennies is pointless, but it can really add up.

---

Side note: The GPT site had a decent referral system (as well as contest for referrers), and one person in particular had a great site set up which was greatly optimized for search engines. Every day they were earning some decent money just from their referrals (without doing any work themselves).

@snapster Good question.

@lichme How much work would it be to code a mehdown command for /woot {item} that will return a thumbnail and a referral link?

@narfcake @snapster Ha, I was actually thinking about that already, but I swear there was something that existed already for converting woot urls into a display. I’d have to look. Doing the work wouldn’t be too hard, getting @shawn to approve it would be the tricky part.

@lichme The previous /woot was a search feature (which Woot itself lacks), but was later dropped. It didn’t do well for shirts, however.

@narfcake It was possibly leveraging the woot API, which doesn’t have the full catalog in it. When did it get dropped, and was that the reason why?

@lichme I think it was dropped here because “no one was using it”. As I recall, it didn’t do well even on the side sale items. The catalog is so deep nowadays that it’d be undesirable to return every result for a search.

@lichme @narfcake it pulled every bit of data from the Woot API and then spun up a little in-memory search engine using Lunr.js to filter current deals down to those matching search terms provided. No one used it for several months so I deleted it from Mehdown.

@lichme @narfcake @shawn (from my perspective at least) there would be no business reason to not approve it.

One other idea to throw about is /WootTracker {item} – this would obviously then have @lichme affiliate inclusion (and possibly support posting / commenting here?)

@lichme @shawn @snapster I can see that helping. It’ll make it much easier to just type “/woottracker Cat In The Wild” (or maybe keep it /wootstalker) and return this:

Cat In The Wild - $15

… versus hand coding it.

@lichme @narfcake sorry yes, meant to type stalker there.

So I think maybe I would have a business-side ask in exchange: including the Meh community discussion links & comment count on WootStalker would serve us both well

@narfcake @snapster Is this in relation to product discussions, or user generated threads? If product discussions, that is already in place for the active item and has been since 2014, a few months before Mehstalker was launched. Clicking the product image brings up the additional info on the main deal section.

If talking about the community related threads as well, I’d prefer to source that from a data feed, but don’t think one exists. Also, asked a couple times before, any plans on a data feed for the other mediocre sites?

Fun fact: woottracker.com is also my domain, although not maintained, I used it as a template for mehstalker, which is why they look the same.

@lichme this is in relation to Meh having Woot product discussions here at Meh using WootStalker embeds and scripting work to trigger them by you. Then also having a link pointing to these Meh threads back on WootStalker itself. So a WootStalker deal would have 2 discussion threads to point at, both with discussion counts.

@lichme next step here would be a Mehdown pull request. Pretty sure you know the drill with that.

@narfcake

Don’t get too… sheety. They’re just giving us a little sheet. We can make the most of it. We can always tell them to tuck off.