Steve's X10 Blog

I've been watching our friends at Woot.com for a while now and have to say I'm impressed. These guys know how to have fun selling online. And in the process have found a way to make the entire online shopping experience entertaining and fun.

As you can tell by our site, we also subscribe to this idea that shopping online should be fun and entertaining. We are always working on new creative ways to do this. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail miserably. But you never know unless you try.

It's also fun to see how after we do something new, we start seeing other online retailers doing the same thing. They say imitation the sincerest form of flattery. So, yesterday we decided to tear a couple pages from the Woot marketing handbook and put our own spin on it.

We call it X10's Midnight Bandit. We took one of our best sellers, the wireless video sender and knocked the price down to just $5 for a extremely limited number of orders. The number we decided on was 10. As it turned out, orders came in so fast our system didn't shut the deal down until we had received orders for 21. That was fine since we threw the whole thing together in an afternoon. And of course we'll gladly honor all of the orders.

Now, for everyone who missed the $5 deal, we still offered an incredible price of only $29.99 which is another $20 off what we normally sell it for. So, needless to say today has been a huge day for the Video Sender.

We gave the page a Woot style layout, added a way for you to share your comments on the deal, created a graph of hourly orders, added an audio message and sent out a deal alert email to a select group. Yes, all this was done after the idea came to us at about 1 p.m. yesterday. Now, I have to commend our web engineers here for a minute. They are truly the best in the business and do things in just hours where most companies take weeks or months

I have a strong sense there will be more Midnight Bandit deals in the future.

Check out our first Midnight Bandit deal here:
http://www.x10.com/promotions/goldmine_lola2.html

And, if you want to get in on the next deal, sign up for the new email alerts on that page.

Good Luck!

Steve Groenier
Director of Marketing