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)
CrispyShop is a new tool for comparison shopping. Launched last week, CrispyShop lets you search and compare prices and specs for pretty much anything sold online, using visualization that's both useful and easy on the eyes. CrispyShop is built on ShoppingPath, a technology that visually sorts and separates search results. All results come from Yahoo Shopping, and provide users with direct links to purchase products from popular Web shopping sites like Newegg and Buy.com.
Search results show up in a scatter plot, with product thumbnails that magnify when you mouse over them, similar to the dock on Mac OS X. It's a really neat effect that's actually fairly useful for getting a ton of results in a small space. Even cooler is the capability to tab back and forth between both selected products and comparison options without refreshing. This is especially helpful when comparing computer monitors, as you can check the screen size, resolution, and response time without having to go to individual product pages.
CrispyShop is not without a few flaws. If you want to search for prices on a single product, you'll have to specify what category it falls into. I'd like to see a simple search box (like Google) that doesn't require having to pick from the 25 genres to aim the search tool at what you're looking for. Also, the individual results don't always give you the kind of depth you can get from sites like Newegg or Epinions. There are user reviews, but you'll often have duplicate search results, some of which have reviews and others that don't.
CrispyShop is a useful tool for looking at a lot of results at once. The lack of a real shopping community or user profiles keep it from being a group experience; but as a direct comparison tool, CrispyShop does a good job of making things easy.
See also BrowseGoods for neat shopping visualization.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
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