Well, I was surfing around one day, many a moon ago, and I saw a most interesting site, known as Woot! Woot buys up entire lots of goods gone bad for one reason or another, then sells them at bargain-basement prices. They do it in an interesting way - There’s one new product every day, put up at midnight. It stays available until either midnight the next night, or until it sells out, whichever comes first. They then ship it to you for $5.00, no matter the item, no matter the location - assuming that location is in the lower 48 states, that is.
Woot’s deals are sometimes useless, often electic at best, and are all priced to sell out. There’s been many a time when I’ve wished I were in the US, just to get one of these deals.
So, imagine my glee when I saw Off The Truck - a Canadian site. This is not a site with a similar business plan to Woot - this is a complete, obvious COPY of Woot, right down to the template they use (if you need more proof, read through the FAQs of both sites; while the words are different the EXACT same information is present in each sentence).
The only difference is, Woot looks like a halfway professional site, while “Off the Truck” looks like it… well… just fell off the back of a truck. It also has this stupid, annoying, and untrustworthy “Gang feeling” it’s trying to create. I suppose that’s what qualifies for being “hip” and “cool” nowadays, but it just seems dumb to me.
They’re on their second deal as I write this. Their first deal was an “iriver T30 1GB MP3/WMA/OGG Music Player”, which they had retailing for $99.99. Not a bad price, but I’m not about to drop $105 on an unknown website.
Oh, have I mentioned how poorly it’s coded? If you need proof, just view it in Firefox and look at the top left of the page. It says “Spacer”, clearly, in black text to push over their menu. There’s a way to space out one’s menu that doesn’t involve making you and your company look like a pack of technophobic idiots who know nothing of coding, but they seem to not even realize they made the error. When it first launched, they had more problems - Passwords weren’t *ed out, like most every site does to foil shoulder surfers, it was impossible to register without giving credit card info (even though an option was given to opt out of giving away that information). Heck, some of their links within their site didn’t even work! Someone’s bankrolling them though, 102.1 in Toronto reportedly had on advertisements for this site and, while I’m not expert, I don’t think that advertizing on a Toronto radio station comes cheap. Personally, I’m going to be watching the net and seeing how many people get the things they order, and how happy they are with the service overall, before I jump in. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, they only take Visa, Mastercard or American Express (Alas, no PayPal).