Webware

Webware's Rafe Needleman and I are big fans of Woot.com. Since the introduction of the one-deal-a-day sales site, there have been several clones. However, none have caught my interest like Hoopstick. The site, which currently operates on weekends only, sells just one item a day. The big catch here is that the price tag is constantly changing, meaning patience or pure, dumb luck can get you a deal.

Today's item is a USB headset. When I started writing this, the price tag was hovering around fifteen bucks. Since then, it's come down to $12, jumped back up to $16, then dropped again to $10. The change happens every 15 seconds based on supply and demand. The hotter an item is the pricier it gets, and as soon as a user chooses to buy, it locks him or her into that price--even if it fluctuates post-sale. The one catch here is that you've only got 45 seconds after hitting the buy button to go through with your purchase and five minutes total to go through checkout, otherwise you're kicked back out to try your hand again. This is simply a measure to keep people from hunkering down on a low price without buying.

Hoopstick tracks the price changes throughout the day, which means you can gauge whether you're on an up or down trend. There is a bit of blind luck though, since a slew of other people trying to buy something can drive up the price at a feverish pace.

The service is already off to a great start, however, it will have a tough time matching Woot.com's writing prowess, which quite frequently turns product spec sheets into works of art.

Hoopstick sells things online with a price tag that changes depending on supply and demand.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you read that chick-lit classic Bergdorf Blondes (I'm proud to admit that I did), you'll probably recall the scene in which the shopaholic female protagonists hold a military-style planning session in advance of the legendary Chanel sample sale--a chance for them to snag the high-end designer goods at staggering discounts, the only caveat being that hundreds of other viciously competitive Manhattan women were also hoping to get their hands on the same stuff.

It was only a matter of time before that sort of upper-crust cutthroat shopping hit the Web.

Enter Ideeli (pronounced "ideally"), which debuted Monday after several months of soft-launch. Described as a "red-rope online shopping community," Ideeli is an invite-only site that hosts high-speed sales of luxury goods (so far, just accessories) at 50 to 90 percent discounts and keeps its members in the loop through e-mail and mobile alerts to let them know when a sale has started.

Quantities are limited and can sell out within minutes--if this sounds familiar, it's because it's a model pioneered by rapid-fire sale sites like Woot.com, which has built up an enviable cult following, and the girlier Delight.com.

But as the luxury market warms up to the Web, the Woot model is being applied to sites that are more Sex and the City than Star Trek. Following in the vein of "velvet rope" social networks like ASmallWorld (for the jet set) and Metrofunk (for the club set), Ideeli and similar sites like Gilt Groupe (which hosts high-end online sample sales), are invite-only.

Ideeli has some twists thrown in the mix, too. The site offers a paid "first row" membership ($7.99 per month) that enables mobile alerts and also allows for an hour of early access to sales.

It's obviously not for everyone. Even considering the discounted prices, these are still luxury goods, and hence typically cost a few hundred dollars at the minimum. Some pragmatic shopaholics aren't willing to plunk down that kind of cash without seeing the item in person, or with that kind of impulse-buying required. But some money types are banking on success: Ideeli announced Monday that it has secured $3.8 million in capital from Kodiak Ventures and a handful of angel investors.

Snobbish? Totally. But so are Apple fanboys, for the record. We also happen to have Ideeli invites available for readers: go to ideeli.com and use "cnet" as your invitation code.

In the past couple of years Woot.com has grown from a five-days-a-week deals site to a veritable three-store conglomerate that features a new deal every day, and a wine and T-shirt spinoffs. Today they announced their partnership with Yahoo, as part of Yahoo Shopping for a new co-branded site called Sellout.Woot. The site will serve up a completely different offering than the standard Woot store, and carry with it a small amount of Yahoo branding.

The only way to access the site is via Yahoo Shopping's front page, in what Yahoo is calling the "Deal of the Day." Like the current Woot setup, deals will get refreshed at midnight EST. You can point your browser to Sellout.Woot.com for the time being, although when the site truly goes "live" you'll be re-directed to the front door of Yahoo Shopping. There's also a widget for your MyYahoo page that will update alongside the site's RSS feed.

Since it's just a partnership, Yahoo users will still need to register with Woot to buy the item--there is no cross sharing of user accounts between the two companies. This is a big win for Woot, although current Woot users are likely to feel a twinge of angst at possibility of deals selling out faster with a larger crowd of users that make their way onto Woot's other sales properties.

[via Digg]

The front door of Yahoo Shopping now features the 'Deal of the Day' from the folks at Woot.com.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Internet commerce is becoming the new pastime for many in my generation. Generation Yers like to buy interesting T-shirts online, and there's no shortage of sites out there that are putting out an absurd amount of user-generated designs. Here's a list of more than 20 quality sites that put cotton, and inspiration, on your back.

Readymade:

These services sell shirts that are designed by users and professionals.
• Threadless is one of the most popular shirtmakers out there. It started out with user votes to pick out which shirts would go on sale, and have since moved on to independent designers. When shirts sell out, they're typically not for sale again unless the demand becomes great. They're also set to open a retail store in Chicago next month.

• Glarkware, a small Canadian shirt company, is based out of Toronto, Ontario, and has a fairly eccentric line of humor-related shirts. They've also got a line of T-shirts on the way for toddlers.

• Shirt.Woot. From the same bunch that does good ol' Woot.com and Wine.Woot.com, is Shirt.Woot.com--a one-shirt-per-day service that rolls out a new design every night at midnight Central time. Every shirt is always $10 with free shipping, along with the option to get it delivered in two days for another five bucks. While a good deal of the shirts are designed by professionals, the service also runs a weekly "derby" with user-generated designs. The most popular design goes on sale, and the designer gets a cut of the profits.
  

  Dreaded Spam becomes T-shirts at SpamShirt.com.

• Bountee is a hybrid service that offers both professionally designed T-shirts and a build-it-yourself solution. Bountee features a variety of "Web 2.0" features like tagging, user ratings, and commenting. It's also got a really slick, easy-to-use design.

• Split The Atom is a U.K.-based T-shirt company that's pretty much exactly like Threadless, but with a smaller selection. It also takes user designs in return for a one-time cash prize.

• Design by Humans has a very small collection of shirts, but offers some pretty decent prize money for winning designers with a daily, weekly, and monthly design contest. Each designer also gets their own profile page for listing any background information and to showcase some of their other works.

• BustedTees and Defunker are two very different Net T-shirt services from the same company. Bustedtees is more about humor, while Defunker offers more designer solutions akin to Threadless. Both sites are really slick, but between the two, Defunker feels a bit snappier. There's also a pretty large price gap, with most Bustedtees topping out at around $16, and Defunker averaging in the high-$20s and mid-$30s.

• T-ShirtHell. There's a reason this site has a warning page and a hellish name. These shirts are the kind that will get you stares in public, and usually not for a good reason. Definitely not for the faint of heart, or workplace.

• The Cotton Factory doesn't actually make cotton, but they have a very solid selection of designer, and humor T-shirts. There's even a section of T-shirts less than 10 bucks. There's some real gems in this place, especially if you like "ninja" apparel.
  ... Read more

Snooth is a wine review and recommendation service that launched early last month. The idea is simple--provide a few simple ratings of wines you like or dislike, and Snooth will serve up ones it thinks you'll enjoy. It runs on a similar system to the one you find on Netflix, with one to five star ratings, and a bevy of user reviews. The system currently has a listing of over 1.5 million wines, and if you can't find one you've had or liked in the past, you can simply add it.

In addition to showing user rants and raves, Snooth pulls professional reviews from online publications, which it pools into separate ratings. Each wine's page also features the option to buy it from one of the partnered wine dealers, which will jump you off Snooth's site, and onto their online store. In most cases, I found that the deals on the partner sites weren't that much better than the prices at my local wine dealer, but it's nice to have that option.

There's also a friends system, with user profiles that let you see what your Snooth buddies have been rating on the site, and an RSS feed in case you feel like keeping tabs in your favorite feed reader.

One of the only problems I ran into with Snooth was its segmentation of wine years. Since many a connoisseur will tell you that a lot can happen to a wine from year to year, it's important to attribute a review of a wine to the correct year, which Snooth handles by making different product pages for each vintage. This is handy, but it simultaneously scatters the reviews. Now take someone who has had a mass market wine like Yellow Tail's Shiraz once or twice a year for the past three years. The wine might have tasted similar all three times, but they're not likely to go in and write three different reviews--especially if the experience was nearly identical each time. To justify that, it would make a lot more sense for each wine to get its own page, and have an option to filter the reviews and commerce links by year.

There is a workaround to this, by sorting via vintage in Snooth's search filters, but it's still no easy task to browse other vintages and reviews from any old product page.

I like Snooth. I think it's simple to use, and does its job. After just five ratings you start getting recommendations, which is handy. As for actually purchasing wine online, I think I'll stick to my favorite.

Related:
An eBay for wine collectors
Embrace your inner wine snob

Rate wines you've had and get recommendations for wines Snooth thinks you'll like.

(Credit: CNET Networks)