The complain was that it wasn’t fair to characterize Groupon’s deal of the day offers in this manner. The suggestion was that Groupon offers aren’t really like that anymore and that while there is an occasional skydiving lesson or massage in the mix that Groupon has diversified into many other areas.

In an effort to be fair, I went into the inbox of the email account I use to sign up for things online. Like many people, I use this account when a company insists that I give them an email address to use their service, but from whom I don’t really want to actually be getting emails on a regular basis. That way, I can go check that email account when I hear about a good deal or am curious, but I can just ignore it the rest of the time. I’m not the only one who does that, which does call into question how valuable all of those so-called “registered users” on Groupon might actually be worth.

However, that is not why we gather today. Today, we look at what kind of daily deal offers Groupon offers up currently, thanks to the long list of undeleted (unread) emails in my shopping/rewards email inbox.

These are the deals for the Denver area. That is where I live and where I signed up to get deals. Ironically, it makes for a pretty solid test case. Denver is major city, but not one of the biggest. It typifies the kind of market that supposedly makes Groupon so hard to replicate because it is far away from both coasts and other big cities, so if you want to sell local here, you have to deliberately make the effort to but boots on the ground (or calls on the phone) in an area that can’t just be gathered under the wing of the sales force from a nearby area.

The groups are pretty self explanatory.

1. Gym = Memberships, fitness classes, and personal training
2. Nails = Manicures and Pedicures
3. Hair = Haircuts, laser hair treatments, and waxing

What Kinds of Groupon Deals Are There Currently

• 1/20/11 – Restaurant
• 1/19/11 – Dentist
• 1/18/11 – Car Wash
• 1/17/11 – Symphony Ticket
• 1/16/11 – Restaurant
• 1/15/11 – Gym
• 1/14/11 – Hair
• 1/13/11 – Boat Show Ticket
• 1/12/11 – Restaurant
• I don’t have my emails for 1/4/11 to 1/11/11 – Apparently, I did delete some
• 1/3/11 – Nails
• 1/2/11 – Restaurant
• 1/1/11 – Hair
• 12/31/10 – Yoga
• 12/30/10 – Coffee
• 12/29/10 – Hair
• 12/28/10 – Restaurant
• 12/27/10 – Poster
• 12/26/10 – Photos
• 12/25/10 – Stock Show Ticket
• 12/24/10 – Tanning
• 12/23/10 – Restaurant
• 12/22/10 – Gym
• 12/21/10 – Restaurant
• 12/20/10 – Knitting Class
• 12/19/10 – Gym
• 12/18/10 – Restaurant
• 12/17/10 – Teeth Whitening
• 12/16/10 – Restaurant
• 12/15/10 – Paintball

I have a lot more, and based on scanning subject lines, there are no skydiving lessons to be found. In fact, the number one category is restaurants, followed by some form of hair, nails, or tanning. Maybe it is diversifying.

Do you thing Groupon offers a variety of deals in your area? Does it feel like something is offered a lot? Too often? Let us know.

Are Groupon Offers Worth It? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

In case you aren’t familiar with it, Woot.net offers one “deal” every day. When that deal is sold out, it is all gone and you can’t get anymore. No new deal takes its place until the next day, when there is once again a new deal for the day. Sometimes the deals are amazing, and sometimes the deals are pretty much the same kind of price you would be able to get anywhere if you just looked around a little bit.

One thing that Woot does on a fairly regular basis is offer refurbished or reconditioned products. A refurbished item is one that has gone from being new, to getting back into the manufacturer’s hands where it is fixed or looked over, and then sold again. Since the device technically is not new, it is labeled as refurbished.

Theoretically, a refurbished item has been restore to “like new” condition, but this is an obvious falsehood since no manufacturer offers the full “like new” warranty on their refurbished products. They know as well as you do that a product that had to be fixed is more likely to have other problems than one that was fine right out of the box the first time. So, you get either no warranty at all, or a much shorter one than normal.

Depending upon what you are buying and how likely it is to break, buying refurbished can be a good way to get a great deal by paying much less than a new product costs for one that is likely just as good. On the other hand, some products aren’t very robust in the first place and paying less for one with a virtually useless warranty is not a good idea. Saving money requires only buying the right kinds of things when they are refurbished. The catch is that it is not always easy to tell which is which.

That brings us to the Refurbished iRobot Roomba. Frequent users of Woot like to joke about how often reconditioned Roobmas show up on the website. It seems that the iRobot Roomba 530 Robotic Vacuum with Virtual Wall seems to show up the most often. When refurbished Roombas show up in a Woot-Off, they bring the special multi-deal day auctions to a screeching halt while it takes hours to sell out.

In fact, I would guess that Woot has to hold off the iRobot folks lest their products fill the site several days each week.

Which begs the question, is buying a refurbished cheap irobot roomba a good idea? Or, are refurbished Roombas a scam?

Unfortunately, the answer is that iRobot Roombas are great little carpet sweeper vacuums when they work properly. However, they are incredibly fragile. The problem is that doing what the Roobma does actually requires more expensive hardware, but people won’t pay more for robot vacuums. That means that iRobot has to try and make do with the fastest manufacturing processes and the cheapest parts.

Frankly, the company has done an admirable job in being able to make a robotic vacuum with all of the features people want at a price they are willing to pay. But, in the end, Roombas are very temperamental and prone to breaking both quickly and often. The company stands behind its products with a one-year manufacturer warranty, which is good. However, since they break a lot, the company ends up with TONS of Roombas that it fixes and then has to resell as reconditioned Roombas or refurbished Roombas.

• If you want to see for yourself, check any of the Roomba forums and you’ll see many Roobma problems that are so common they have names. Do a search for roomba circle dance, roomba battery problem, and roobma cliff sensors, for several examples. (Hint: Ignore all results from ehow.com or fixya.com as they are usually worthless.)

• For an even more useful search include either roomba 4xxx or roomba 5xxx or even roomba 3xxx in your search. This is how Roobma owners and techies refer to the specific problems that plague each series of Roomba robotic vacuums. (The xxx is a place holder. Most problems that happen to any of the 4000 series Roombas happens to all of them whether they are Roomba 4100 Red, Roobma 4105 Sage, or Roomba 4210 Discovery.)

• Or check here for a very active Roomba owners forum where you can read for yourself about not only the issues with Roombas and how to troubleshoot roomba vacuums, but also the fixes which often involve one tiny component such as an internal LED, but renders the entire Rooba robot vacuum useless unless fixed.

Refurbished Roombas are sold with only a 90-day warranty. Basically, the company washes its hands of the ones that were broken by getting them working and shipping them back out with a short warranty that ensures they will likely not have to deal with that particular unit again, which is good, since plenty of new ones are headed back into the factory at any time. For consumers however, it is not so good. If there was a weak solder or connection on one part that is fixed, but the other another has not broken YET, it might also have a weak connection and will break soon, although probably after 90 days.

The question is whether or not this is a self-defeating strategy for iRobot and its attempts to build a market in robotic vacuums. While it may be true that there is no wiggle room in increasing the costs associated with making Roombas, reselling units that are more likely to have trouble than brand new units could very well be creating a population of Roomba owners who will

1. Never buy another Roomba again because the refurbished one they bought broke so quickly
2. Will recommend to friends and neighbors not to buy Roombas because they break too easily
3. Will be willing to buy a robot vacuum from a competitor when technology allows better, longer-lasting, roomba-type vacuums to be built for lower costs
4. And, of course, will tell friends to buy the other brand because it doesn’t break right away like Roombas do

As corporate strategies go, the one iRobot seems to be pursuing is one destined to fail. There are only so many consumers willing to try a robotic vacuum in the first place. Each one of them that is alienated by a faulty refurbished Roomba reduces that pool by one more. While Roomba is the only game in town today, people tend to have long memories of being burned, especially on higher priced items like the iRobot Roombas. That means that when they are easier to develop and sell than they are now, there are going to be plenty of waiting customers for new competitors.

Although it might cost Roomba more on the bottom line in the short-term, the company would be better served for the long-term by offering a full one-year warranty on its refurbished Roombas, just like it does on new ones. Doing so might even allow for them to be sold a higher price than they are now. More importantly, doing so would stop the creation of an army of Roobma haters who think that Roobmas are junk and buying one is just a scam. Perhaps, most useful of all, as refurbished Roombas came back in for service the company could learn what it is that goes wrong most often the second time around and perhaps preemptively “fix” the potential problems on every refurbished Roomba before it goes out the door, resulting in fewer warranty service requests on refurbished Roombas, thus negating the additional expense of servicing them for a longer time.

Of course, that only works if the company is not fully aware that all Roombas are just ticking time-bombs that the company needs to ship and get off of the service life-cycle as quickly as possible to avoid bankruptcy. In which case, there really is no valid strategy, other than to hope that people never wise up.

The author has owned two Roomba vacuums, a Roomba 4100 Red, which worked perfectly for almost three years before the battery died, and a refurbished Roomba 530 which developed the common Roobma problem where when turned on it keeps trying to backup because it thinks its bump sensor has been activated. The author still owns both Roomba, although both gather dust in the corner of the basement because replacing the Roomba Red battery is too expensive, and fixing the 530 Roomba requires near complete disassembly or paying as much as the purchase price to have it fixed. When asked, the author tells people, “When they work, they are pretty great, but they seem to break very easily, so it might not last very long.”

I’ve never seen anyone buy one after I tell them that, and I am not an iRobot Roomba hater. I just can’t justify buying a new one until I start hearing that they are much more reliable.

Are Refurbished Roombas A Good Deal Or A Scam? is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Obviously, websites with different purposes or audiences require different page designs, but I thought I could find an overall template for webpage designs that would be usable for multiple websites in the same category that performed the same function.  However, even similar websites can’t be shoehorned into a single design.

This morning I was doing what I always do for my morning break which is browsing through the handful of online deals websites that I like.  I know there are hundreds of other deals sites out there or coupon sites or sites with free shipping codes, but the four sites I scroll through every day have turned out to the best deal websites on the Internet for the types of things that I buy and shop for.

In no particular order, my favorite deals websites are:

• Woot
• Slickdeals
• Dealnews
• GottaDeal

All four sites are in the same category of online shopping or Internet-based shopping tips.  All four sites offer daily updates of the best deals they can offer.  But, each one has a completely different design and layout to serve its readers best.  The difference in designs and what that design offers, is very likely one of the main reasons I continue to use all four sites despite the fact that I just don’t buy stuff all that often.

Woot is the most well known.  They offer a single great deal each day.  If the deal happens to hit you with something you want or need, then you win.  If not, then you wait another day. Either way, the site displays a single product including its picture and a tongue-in-cheek review of the product that doesn’t generally contain any real facts until the end.  It is just accepted by users of the site that whatever the product and price is, that it is a good deal.  The site makes no mention of how good of a deal, nor whether it is a better or worse deal than might be sniffed out elsewhere.

SlickDeals.net offers many features to its users including forums where visitors can discuss potentially good deals, coupons, discount codes, and even the quality and specifications of the products in question.  However, the main landing page of SlickDeals is simply a list of text links.  Each product is listed along with its price.  No other information, pictures, or graphics are provided unless you click one of the links.  Only the best of the best make the SlickDeals front page, no matter how many or how few deals that means the site has on any particular day.  If only one item rises to the level demanded by the SlickDeals front page, then only one deal gets posted.  There is no filler.

DealNews and GottaDeal, by contrast, both have more extensive listings including a picture of the sale item as well as notes such as when, if ever, the item was offered for less and whether or not it takes a rebate or coupon to get the low discount price.

While both DealNews and GottaDeal look similar at a glance, a closer look reveals that DealNews groups their big deals by type with computers and computer related deals at the top and other deals at the bottom.  This layout promotes the ability to seek specific sale items. 

GottaDeal on the other hand lists their items chronologically as they appeared on the site.  The upside is that a regular user can stop looking once they encounter the deals they have already seen which can save time.  The downside is that if someone is looking for a deal on a hard drive, for example, they would have to scroll through the whole listing to ensure that they didn’t miss something.

In the in, four sites all offering very similar functionality are laid out and designed completely differently based upon their needs and the needs of their readers. I guess the best a professional writer and web designer can do is build a collection of tools for their design and development toolbox and then pull each individual piece out as it is needed.  It isn’t as sleek as a re-usable template, but if used properly can still save plenty of time and effort while still providing top quality websites.

Time to change the quest.  No longer do I seek the one great website design.  Now, I seek the great design elements and tools that build them.

Top Online Deals Websites Demonstrate Concept of Tradeoffs in Web Design is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC

Microsoft has said that it will offer free OS upgrades to Windows 7, but only for Vista Home Premium and above.  That means that you are really paying an extra $150 to $250 for that computer with Vista Home Basic on it.  Unless, of course, you love Windows Vista and plan on keeping it on your computer instead of upgrading to Windows 7.

Oh yeah, and you have to buy your computer between certain dates to qualify.  As of the latest information, you have to purchase your computer AFTER mid-June to get the free upgrade.  It’s already late May, so just hold out another month before buying that new laptop or computer and then make sure it has Vista Home Premium or higher installed on it.  Otherwise, you are just wasting money.

The only Windows Vista® versions eligible for the program are :

1. Windows Vista® Home Premium
2. Windows Vista® Business
3. Windows Vista® Ultimate

* Microsoft Windows Vista® Home Basic, Windows Vista® Starter Edition, and Windows® XP (all editions) are not qualifying products under the program.

Also, note that the company you buy your computer from, called the OEM in the industry, has the option of participating or not in the program and also has the option of using shorter dates.  Expect the full service computer manufacturers (brand name companies) to step up.  Those “off-brand” vendors are going to be more of a gamble.

This info is all over the Internet, but everyone is getting it from the same place, Tech ARP.

Don’t Buy Computer With Vista Home Basic – Vista Home Premium Is Minimum Requirement to Get Free Upgrade to Windows 7 is a post from Best Hubris. All content exclusively written by Freelance Writing Business of ArcticLlama, LLC