14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon has made another interesting acquisition after last year’s Zappos. And if you though Zappos was somewhat of an odd match to Amazon, from a company culture point of view, this latest move takes the cake. The giant online retailer acquired Woot, a deals site with an interesting take on e-commerce. Financial aspects of the deal have not been disclosed, but rumors say the price was at $110 million.
Woot usually only sells one item each day offering a special deal. Incidentally, today's deal is on the Amazon Kindle. It thrives thanks to great community engagement and the light tone it conducts its business with. It pioneered the one-deal-per-day model which has since been adopted, successfully, by other sites. Woot will continue to operate independently, similar to how Amazon has handled the Zappos and Audible acquisitions.
That is probably the strategy, for Amazon and Woot alike. Much of the site’s success is attributed to its great culture and engagement with the community and any corporate interferences would not be taken lightly by the customers. It continues an interesting strategy from Amazon to acquire companies highly valued by their customers and let them continue to operate independently. It did this with Zappos last year, which it valued at $1 billion plus at the time, and it is doing it now with Woot.
On its part, Woot is handling the acquisition in typical fashion. “Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say ‘Matt Rutledge revealed to be monstrous pseudo-human creation of Jeff Bezos.’ You might even see this photo making the rounds. Rest assured that these rumors have nothing to do with our final decision. 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,” Matt Rutledge, Woot’s CEO, wrote as part of a lengthy letter to employees.