For those of you unfamiliar with Woot!, they basically sell a semi-limited quanity of one thing per day, and it is usually a pretty good deal. The listings get updated at Midnight central time (10pm Pacific), and can sometimes sell out immediately. Typically the proprieters have a good sense of humor and they’ve done a great job building a community around their business.

So last year Woot! did their “Bag-O-Crap” thing on Christmas. Bag-O-Crap / BOC / Blinged Out Cabbage, etc. sort-of a customer appreciation event, where you buy a bag of random crap for $5, and you usually get some pretty good stuff. Normally it sells out very quickly.

I figure if they did it last year, they probably would do it this year as well. So I set my iPhone to alert me 5 minutes to 10, so I can have a shot at getting a BOC (which I’ve never been able to do).

10 pm rolls around–and sure enough, the BOC is up.

I try logging in, realize I forgot my password (I only order maybe 4 times a year from them). After I remember my password, it logs me in and tells me it is sold out. Bear in mind this whole process took at most 90 seconds.

Turns out they sold 4500 bags of crap in 1:15. Not one hour and fifteen minutes, but 75 seconds. I realize the site is very popular, but I find it somewhat hard to believe that is possible. I can’t help but believe that at least some of that was done by bots.

So I missed out. Again.

Wonder if it is time to implement a CAPTCHA system?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.