Woot.com, a website that sells one item per day at discount price, announced yesterday that it had agreed to be acquired by Amazon.com.
The company, which will continue to operate from its headquarters in Carollton, TX, follows previous acquisitions, including Audible.com and Zappos, that Amazon has pretty much left to run on their own.
In his usual tongue-in-cheek style, CEO Matt Rutledge wrote 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."
In a similar vein, Mr. Rutledge added, "We think now is the right time to join with Amazon because, quite simply, every company that becomes a subsidiary gets two free downloads until the end of July, and we very much need that new thing with Trent Reznor's wife on our iPods."
Woot is a combination online store and community site that focuses on selling a single item a day at cheap prices. It originally started out in 2004 as "an employee-store slash market-testing type of place for an electronics distributor," but eventually became a viable retail business on its own. The company also operates other sites, including kids.woot, shirt.woot, sellout.woot and wine.woot.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Discussion Questions: What do you think Amazon is looking to gain with
its purchase of Woot? Do you see aspects of the Woot model that you believe
would apply to other areas of Amazon's business?
[Editor's Note] In what is probably a happy coincidence, Woot is selling an Amazon Kindle with 6" screen for $149 ($5 shipping) today. The same item on Amazon goes for $189 (free shipping).