Amazon has announced it will purchase the popular site Woot.com, the site that became famous for selling just one item at a time, usually at a large discount from its normal prices.
Retailers use sites like Woot to either dump excess inventory or introduce new customers to their brand of products.
Consumers, on the other hand, get the thrill of racing other would-be buyers for a sharply discounted item.
Woot launched in 2004 and now has 2.75 million registered users. The site sells all types of items, but mostly electronics. For example, today’s Woot item is the Apple iPod Nano 8GB, 5th Generation , selling for $99 USD, a big discount from even Amazon, which has the same item listed at $125.
Amazon was Woot’s only outside investor, when they bought a piece in 2006.
The NYTimes explains that Woot is also a wholesale distributor, which distributes to Target, Amazon, and others.
Result for: distributor
Think back a few months to a fight that took place between Redbox and the major Hollywood studios. Hollywood execs were all hot and bothered about how Redbox kiosk’s cheap $1 movie rentals were cannibalizing new DVD and Blu-ray sales, and decided to order their wholesale distributors not to sell to Redbox for a month or more after the initial release.
Redbox launched some legal action in response and decided to buy directly from retailers to stock kiosks as a workaround. However, that came crashing down for Redbox when Wal-Mart and other retailers imposed limits on the number of units of the same film a single customer can buy from them. Long story short, Redbox ended signing deals with Fox, Universal and Warner Bros. that required a 28-day window before Redbox kiosks could offer new titles for rental.
Paramount however decided to actually test whether or not the availability of new titles from rent from Redbox kiosks affects the sales of new DVD or Blu-ray releases. It signed a deal with Redbox in August 2009 which would allow it to stock new releases on the same day as the title comes out on Blu-ray and DVD. Redbox agreed at the time to share rental data with Paramount so that it could evaluate the potential benefits of a longer-term contract.
Following the 10-month analysis of DVD sell-through and renal performance, Paramount and Redbox announced on Tuesday that Paramount had extended its revenue sharing license agreement, providing Redbox access to Paramount DVD and Blu-ray titles to rent on the same day they are released in the sell-through market.
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Result for: distributor
Engadget has reported today that Apple and AT&T originally signed a five-year exclusivity pact in 2007 with the launch of the original iPhone, although it is unclear whether that deal is still in effect, just three years later.
The site found the official details out after reading a 2008 court filing by Apple, although a USAToday report made it clear in 2007 that AT&T was the exclusive distributor of the phone in the United States. Verizon also passed on the original deal.
The filing was necessary because Apple and AT&T were the subject of a class-action lawsuit filed in 2007, which claimed that the carrier had a monopoly over iPhone customers, since after their contract expired, they could not jump to another carrier, as the handset was locked down.
Nilay Patel of Engadget says the real question may be whether the deal is still in effect, or been reworked since 2008: “Contracts can be canceled, amended, and breached in many ways, and AT&T’s spotty recent service history plus the explosion of the iPhone and the mobile market in general have given Apple any number of reasons to revisit the deal. In addition, the two companies obviously hit the negotiating table again to hammer out the iPad’s pricing plans, and there’s no way of knowing whether that deal involves the iPhone as well.”
It will be interesting to see whether or not an iPhone for Verizon or any other carrier is on the way sometime this year, or if that 2012 deal is still in effect.
