Yes, I know that it has been discussed many many times before, but I just had to post something just to get it off my chest.
We all know that a lot of east coast people (me being one) have griped about how we have to stay up till 1am to see if its a good woot or not. I’m going to put forth my suggestion and see what everyone else thinks. Unfortunately, these forums don’t allow polls, otherwise it would be pretty interesting to see how everyone voted.
My proposed suggestion would be for woot to split up the merchandise to the 3 different time zones. Start the woot @ midnight for each one, then just divide the quantity of woots evenly for each.
I know that this can easily be done because they have the woot offs configured the way the do, that it switches when something sells out. They have to be able to set it so that it changes at a particular time. Except in this case, it would still keep the same woot for the day. It would basically only be needed to change if an item sells out of course though. Think about it… you come to woot and see the coveted B-O-C was up and its currently sold out BUT there is a timer that reads that there are 41 minutes until this is offered again!
Here are the gained benefits I can see:
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Woot should be able to handle the orders better because they would all be broken up into smaller groups. For instance, say they had 10000 B-O-C’s that everybody wants. Break that up into 3 groups of approx 3300 for each time zone. So instead of processing 10000 orders at once they only have to process groups of 3300 with about half an hour of processing time… sometimes more.
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Wooters would have more a chance of getting what they wanted. If for instance something sells out in the first time zone and they missed it, they would then know if they really wanted it they have 2 more chances but they would have to sacrifice sleep for it. On the flip side, some of the wooters in the other time zones could see that the woot isn’t something they really want so there is no need to stay up.
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It would be bound to get more wooters hooked. Knowing that they would have three possible chances of getting something they wanted. How could anyone really complain if they had 3 opportunities but still missed out. 3 strikes… you’re out would be my response.
The one draw back that some had said before to this suggestion was that people would be able to get 3 times more of the item if they got in on all 3 different offerings. Well, woot has proven that they could indeed take care of that when there was the infamous B-O-C incident. They were able to put the B-O-C up the next night while denying those that had already ordered one to order again. If this could be facilitated in the short amount of time in between the 3 different time zones I don’t know. I don’t know if it took woot all night to pull off the B-O-C incident or not.
So that is my suggestion… nothing more… nothing less. Maybe someone @ woot will read and think about it, maybe they won’t. If anything, it may start an interesting conversation in this thread. [:)] Let me know what you all think.