Aa couple of small but significant quality-of-life improvements just landed:
Some time ago it occurred to me that the Woot+ homepage has been severely underutilized. It was originally intended to display a selection of high-value products that Woot shoppers would presumably be keen to see, but it's never been obvious how to identify those products. As a result, since its official launch in May 2023 the homepage has been been presenting the same selection of products to everyone.
Not anymore! The Woot+ homepage is now yours to set up as you see fit.
The Customize Homepage link presents a new screen whereby you get to specify what appears on your homepage by providing your own collection of filter criteria (referred to as "Searches"). Once the product catalog has loaded, your searches will be run and the first 12 items matching that search will be shown. Clicking on the title link within each section will take you to the Shop page where you can view all matching products.
A minor consequence of this change is that the homepage now takes slightly longer to appear because the product catalog must first be loaded before the searches can be run. The upshot is that when you navigate to the Shop page, the catalog has already been loaded so the list of products will show up immediately.
What's most exciting about this change is that it sets the stage for notifications to be delivered via email when products come up for sale on Woot that match a given set of search criteria. I have a fairly clear idea as to how this will be achieved and look forward to getting started on it!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mmmmm...feedback! 🍪
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.
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.