I've received a number of inquiries regarding the discrepancy between the products appearing
on Woot+ vs. those for sale on woot.com. There are three possible reasons for this:
1) The product is sold out
Since day one, Woot+ has chosen not to display products that are listed on Woot! but are
already sold out. I have revised this behavior so Woot+ will display ALL products published
by the official Woot Developer API.
2) The Woot Developer API is not providing the correct information
Since I don't have visibility into what goes on behind the Woot! curtain, this is just a
speculative theory. It is well possible that the set of products published by the
Woot Developer API available to 3rd-party
developers differs from the set that is published on the official Woot! website.
3) There is a delay between the time products are published on Woot! and the time they appear on Woot+
Woot+ retrieves a fresh set of data from the Woot Developer API every
30 minutes. Ideally this timeframe would be smaller, but due to
the stringent limit of 1000 total requests per day,
it's around the best we can do without exceeding that threshold and getting no data until the following day.
March 12, 2025
Soooo, you know how Woot+ allows you to search only by the product title? That’s by design.
It allows the real-time search to be lightning fast and it ensures relevant results.
A major limitation has been the fact that it was doing exact matching on a given search term.
This meant that if you entered two words (ex: "iPhone case") you’d likely get no results because
most titles look more like this: "OtterBox iPhone 15 Pro MagSafe Case".
Woot+ search has been revised so that when given multiple search terms (separated by spaces), it
will match each of those terms individually. Searching for "iPhone case" will now yield results
containing the words "iPhone” AND "case".
In retrospect this seems like an obvious thing and it should have worked this way since launch.
(It took me about 15 minutes to make the change.) It simply didn’t occur to me, but I’ll bet it
occurred to some of you. To that end, if you have any suggestions on how to increase the utility of
Woot+, please pass them on via the Feedback form.
One of the most compelling (and overlooked) features of Woot+ is its ability to quickly save items of
interest while sifting through the shop.
Think of it like clothes shopping: normally you'll grab a few things off the rack that might be a fit,
then you'll head over to the changing room to see if you really like the item enough to shell out some
hard earned cash. Woot+ has offered this facility since the day of its official of launch (April 2022),
but for whatever reason it has not been heavily used. My hope is that by renaming the feature to
"Bookmarks" its purpose will be more apparent and it'll see some traction.
If you haven't already, give Bookmarks a try and see if it makes life any easier for ya.
February 12, 2025
Until now there has been no practical way for you to vent your anger and frustration about the
countless ways Woot+ has failed to deliver the experience you so desire from a Woot "search engine".
It's been on my mind for ages to provide some means of collecting input from this community,
and at last it is done.
If you've got ideas on how to improve Woot+ or you just can't resist the urge to vent, head
over to the feedback page and drop a line letting me know how to bring this
project one step closer to perfection.
From time to time there will be something I feel the Woot+ community should know about.
Since I've not been making good use of social media to promote the site, I can't (yet) rely
on it as a means of communicating with all you good people. For the moment there's this:
a page where announcements can be posted for your reading displeasure.