I’ve extolled the greatness of Woot.com in this space previously. But until yesterday, I’d never bought anything from them. I checked in regularly just to read the product descriptions. As someone who has had to write such blurbs, I really appreciate how clever they are. Anyway, so yesterday I bought something and received an e-mail from Woot Member Services welcoming me. These sorts of e-mails don’t normally make for great reading. Which is why I was surprised when I read the entire thing — and actually enjoyed it. It begins: “Welcome to the warm embrace of Woot, the first, best, and most hygienic daily deal site! Sit still a minute because you need to know this stuff.” If you’ve got time to waste, jump to read the rest of it.
Welcome to the warm embrace of Woot, the first, best, and most hygienic daily deal site! Sit still a minute because you need to know this stuff:
You’re now a registered member of all four of our sites: woot.com, shirt.woot.com, wine.woot.com and sellout.woot.com. Don’t be alarmed. We’ll explain more later.
Typical orders take up to 5 business days to ship from our warehouse (except for overnight t-shirt orders, which go out sooner, and wine orders, which take longer). If you order an item during peak times like a Woot-Off, it can take a little longer. Once we ship it, delivery time to your door depends on FedEx or SmartPost.
Once the item ships out, you can access your tracking data by going to Your Account and clicking on the order number. If you have a problem receiving your order, or you receive the wrong item, contact [email protected].
If you receive your item and it doesn’t work, contact the manufacturer first. They made the junk. Let them deal with it. If they turn out to be total tools, contact [email protected] and we’ll grudgingly provide some further assistance.
If you receive your item and decide you don’t like it, take it to eBay or pawn it off on one of your so-called friends. We don’t want it, either. That goes for Woot.com and all of the sites in the Woot.com family. There’s some specific stuff you might want to know about each of the others. And here it comes now.
Shirt.woot – Check the size chart, check the size chart, check the size chart. It’s at the bottom of the product description for each sale. If you order the wrong size, we won’t take it back – your only option is to gain or lose weight so it fits, possibly including painful, costly cosmetic surgery. If you want your overnight order the next day, place it by noon Central time. International orders generally take about 3- 4 weeks to arrive. Looking for an old shirt design? If you’re lucky, it’ll still be for sale via our Reckoning page. If you’re somewhat less lucky, it might turn up as one of our weekly Shirt.Woot Classics. If you think your one-year-old can design a better shirt, encourage your one-year-old to enter the Derby, our weekly design competition. That $1,000 prize can buy a lot of Binkies. http://shirt.woot.com/derby/ http://shirt.woot.com/Blog/?cat=reckoning http://shirt.woot.com/Classics http://shirt.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx
Wine.woot – First, don’t get your hopes up: wine orders can only be shipped to certain states, so read the entire list of eligible states before you print up the invitations to your wine party and place your order. Ineligible orders will be cancelled and refunded. If you do complete your order and receive the tracking data, make sure you give it some time to update. It won’t be uncommon for it to take a little while for real, actual data to show up. You might call the data “late” – we prefer to think of it as “aged”. http://wine.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx
Sellout.woot – Don’t be confused or disoriented by the redirect when you visit the site – we just have to run you through Yahoo! Shopping before you come back to Woot turf. It’s perfectly normal. You should know that we actually sell things here at times that could partner nicely with items from the regular Woot website, giving you a chance to have your cake and eat it, and then take a bite of another guy’s cake when he’s not looking, and mmmm…cake…is this email almost over? We’re getting hungry. http://sellout.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx
Kids.woot – Keep in mind that Kids.Woot is a site that sells childrens’ products, not necessarily a place you’d want your kids hanging out. We make every effort to monitor the content and activity in our message boards, but you should approach Kids.Woot with the same circumspection you’d bring to any other adult-oriented site. Well, not “adult-oriented” in the nasty sense. We just mean it’s for mature audiences only. But not “mature” as in- ah, forget it, you know what we mean. http://kids.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx
Bear with us a moment more and we can all get on with our lives. If you email [email protected], make sure you include your order number and/or username. We’d hate to have to track you down through other, less savory means. And this last bit of information is critical: when you look at your order history and panic because you don’t see an order you placed, make sure you are logged into the Woot site you purchased it from. Your Wine.Woot orders won’t show up in your order history if you’re looking at it on Shirt.Woot, and so on. And you’ll be upset, and we’ll be upset, and we’ll each say things we don’t mean, and even though we’ll eventually work it all out, things will never be the same between us again.
Last but certainly not least, happy Wooting!
Woot Member Services
