Amazon to Acquire Deal-A-Day Pioneer Woot
The online retail giant signs deal to buy Woot and stakes a claim in the burgeoning daily deals marketing niche.
Amazon has signed an agreement to purchase Woot.com for an undisclosed sum, according to a blog post by the latter company on Wednesday. The post stated that Woot will remain autonomous and will not be folded into the online retail giant’s brand.
Six-year-old Woot was one of the first players in the now burgeoning online daily deals space. The Carrollton, TX-based company’s site offers one item per day at a discount until it sells out. As an example, it sold iPod Nanos for $30 less on Wednesday than the price seen on Amazon.com.
In the firm’s beginning, those single product offers consisted mostly of tech items like computers and digital cameras. But in recent years, it has expanded merchandise to involve wine, high-end t-shirts, and children’s products like toys. The company also operates the Sellout Woot property seen on Yahoo’s Shopping site and Deals Woot, which aggregates deals from around the Internet.
It was the first purchase for Seattle-based Amazon since buying online shoe retailer Zappos.com almost one year ago. Since 1998, Amazon has acquired well over 50 companies in retail, technology, and content.
Meanwhile, Woot’s blog post included a message from founder Matt Rutledge to his employees: “We plan to continue to run Woot the way we have always run Woot – with a wall of ideas and a dartboard. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture.”
The company also posted a YouTube video (see below), featuring a monkey doll and an original rap song about the acquisition. The song’s message was clear – Woot’s sometimes quirky company culture should go unchanged.
Follow Christopher Heine on Twitter at @ChrisClickZ.
