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)
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)
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