This week, a fellow blogger at the Lending Club blog asked whether shopping on Woot is financially responsible and gave advice on how to make sure that it is.  To his commentary, I’d like to add how to make money using Woot, or what I affectionately call Woot Arbitrage.

For those of you who don’t know, Woot sells one product each day at a typically unbelieveable price.   Once the item is sold out, you’ll have to wait until the next day for the next deal.  They occasionally hold Woot-offs as well, in which they dump excess inventory by offering a product until it sells out, then moving on to the next product until it sells out, etc.

So how can you make money from the phenomenon that is Woot?  The product offered

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This is a great time of year to sell your old college textbooks compared to the end of a semester. At the end of a semester you have two things going against you. First, that’s when everyone else is selling their books. More competition means lower prices. Second, since books for the next semester haven’t been announced, buyers don’t know which books they’ll need. So you might be able to sell a book that will be worthless in a few months since they are buying some of everything, but you’re unlikely to get as good a price for the books that will be needed.

Fast forward to this time of year, right before the start of a fall semester. Now, few people are selling books and those books that are needed are in high demand. Both of those factors means

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