How to Woot

So your friend just got his Random Crap and it was filled with neat stuff, and you want in on the deal? Well, good luck with that, it's really hard to get one. But if you're absolutely new to Woot, then this page is your how-to guide.

First off, what is Woot? Woot is a deal-a-day site that offers one product for sale every day. If you don't want that product, then you have to wait until the next day before it will change. Also, if the product sells out, then Woot doesn't sell anything for the rest of the day.

Occasionally, Woot hosts an event called a Woot Off. This is a day of internet celebration, when Woot sells limited quantities of the items so they sell out quick, and once the item is sold out, they post another one. During a Woot Off, you'll see a new product between once every 10 minutes and once every hour. You can see a progress bar on Woot's site that tells you how much more of the product they have to sell.

There tends to be about one Woot Off every month, but Woot doesn't tell anyone in advance when the Woot Off will be. You can tell that a Woot off is going on by the flashing lights on Woot's site, and the progress bar counting down. The only way to find out what Woot is selling is to refresh the home page. This is slow and boring, but if you want to score a BoC, you gotta do it.

Enter the Woot tracker. A Woot tracker is a web site or program that refreshes Woot's homepage for you, so you don't have to. The tracker can alert you using sound or popups that a new item has come up, and you can focus on other things. Wooters.us is the best tracker (you can read about why on the About page), but others do exist.

What about this “Random Crap”? During these Woot Offs and occasionally on other special occasions, Woot sells an item called a Random Crap. Online, these are often unofficially called Bags of Crap, or BoCs. This item is literally a box filled with things lying around Woot's warehouse. You get no say in what goes into your BoC, and have no idea either, until it arrives. BoCs are usually just that, a handful of random junk that you can't find a use for. Rarely, though, BoCs include valuable items. You can find lists of BoC items to see for yourself.

Scoring a BoC is hard work. Woot has at least 30,000 customers, and they only sell about 5,000 BoCs in any given Woot Off. Because of the rarity of BoCs, they sell out extremely quickly: in fact, the only reason it takes a whole 5 minutes to sell out is because Woot's servers are under such high load from the people ordering. When a BoC comes up, don't expect to get to Woot.com quickly. It will take you a while to get to the order page, and you had better be quick once it does come up. Refreshing the Woot order page is generally speaking a bad idea, because that is effectively putting you at the end of the line to order, but sometimes you will get skipped in line and will have to refresh. Proper refreshing while scoring a BoC is an art, and takes time to acquire.

So that's all you really need to know about Woot. Don't feel too bad when you don't get a BoC on your first try, or even your second or third. And once you do get one, don't be surprised when all it contains are a few pieces of junk you can't even give away. See you at the next Woot Off!

Some terms

Bag of Crap
See Random Crap
sellout.woot
When Woot “sold out to the man” and became affiliated with Yahoo! Shopping, sellout.woot was created. This site is only available from Yahoo! Shopping's home page, but otherwise follows the same format as Woot's main site.
shirt.woot
Another one of Woot's product sites. shirt.woot sells one T-Shirt each day.
wine.woot
Another one of Woot's product sites. wine.woot sells one wine-related product each week.
Random Crap
An item woot sells that is said to contain 3 random, unknown items. These could be Zune MP3 players, but they're more likely to be a wrench and some bath toys.
Roomba
Woot sells iRobot Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners frequently. Also, wooter.us maintains an IRC bot in #wootoff that announces the product to the #wootoff chat room. The chat bot is named Roomba.
Woot Killer
An item that takes a long time to sell out during a Woot Off. Like the guy at a party who follows you around and won't stop talking.
Woot Off
When Woot sells one item at a time, back-to-back. An internet holiday.
#wootoff
This is the official chat room of Wooters.us (that is to say, we didn't make it, it's just the one we use). It's located on IRC, in #wootoff on EFNet. You can use it from the chat tracker.

Note: The chat room is very loosely moderated and typically obscene and vulgar. The moderators aren't affiliated with wooters.us. It should be considered a rated R chat room.

Woot Tracker
A web site or program that automatically checks Woot's current item, so you don't need to do it yourself. Some have extra features such as sounds, chat, or SMS alerts.