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Woot.com is a pretty cool shopping website. They sell one item a day, and there’s usually a very limited quantity for sale. Sales begin for each item at Midnight. They also publish an RSS feed, so I can read via Bloglines Often, the item sells out before I wake up. So I check what’s up there before I go to sleep. A trademark of each woot sale is a sarcastic description of the product. Not just your run-of-the-mill quick rundown of the product’s features (although those are featured after the creative copywriting that begins the sales pitch). Read today’s description over at the Woot blog. I think they’re funny, engaging, and compelling.

Occasionally, Woot will sell items back to back for a day or two. It’s like a Woot “everything must go” sale. Every few minutes, they’re selling out of shit, and new shit is going online. It’s pretty addictive. I’ll try to post next time one of those happens. I think it’s called a “Woot-Off” (which is sort of a lame name).

I’ve only bought one thing there, two 2-packs of walkie talkie wristwatches. These bulky things have to charge for like 10 hours, and are pretty ridiculous. Radios are pretty inexpensive these days. But if you happen to have a four year old nephew, a wristwatch with a 2-way radio is pretty amazing. The above photo is from the day I gave them to him. We were in Sunflower Market and basically screwed around the whole time my brother was shopping.

But there’s never anything on woot that I ever find exciting. They sell a Microsoft Zune pretty much like twice a month (and always in brown!), a DLP projector about as frequently, and some other nerdy shit.

Woot also operates shirt.woot.com - where they well cool limited run t-shirts every day. They also have a weekly design competition known as a “derby”, where the 3 top-rated designs go into production just a few days after they’ve been submitted. So you can go from schmoe to hero quickly. I need to try to enter one of these sometime soon. Woot also runs wine.woot.com, but I don’t much care about that.

Enter steepandcheap.com. It’s woot for skiers. And snowboarders, too, in all fairness. Steep & Cheap operates in continuous “Woot-Off” mode, so things are always for sale there - at least a few items a day, many days probably a bunch more. They say the products for sale are between 50% and 80% off. Looks to be pretty decent if you’re into ski gear. A day into this site, and it seems to be mainly clothing and goggles, but I have no idea. Additionally, if the current product piques your interest but they’re sold out of your size or what-have-you, there are handy product links to backcountryoutlet.com. After seeing this, I figured that steepandcheap.com is operated by backcountry.com and it’s a great way to drive traffic to their site. Turns out steepandcheap has been around a while (since at least 2004).

I like the idea so much that I reset my homepage to there. I’ll keep it up for a week or so, and will see if any items are worth it. So far it’s just been snowboard clothes - which isn’t my cup of tea.

I wonder how many other websites are out there with this same business model. Feel free to point me to other sites that use this one-at-a-time business model.