Pussycat got nine lives…
Pussycat is very much alive and well, and has been catching some pretty good deals it’s last few runs.
Next run is tonight at 1am Eastern. Deals tend to go live at around 15 past the hour, and then there is a second wave about half hour after that.
Instead of having it’s own page, Pussycat is now part of the “Other” section, and it’s deals can be selected from the filter…. or you can just use the link in the top menu to take you there 🙂
For those that are new – WTF is Pussycat?
Amazon releases clearance items in their Outlet section. This happens pretty much daily at midnight Pacific, usually at relatively low volume. However, twice a week there is a bigger release with much higher discounts. This happens on Wednesday early morning (currently 1am), and Saturday afternoon at 1pm. This may change to noon and midnight, after we change the clocks in a little over a week.
Amazon tends to update prices and coupons in separate batches. They don’t always finish at the same time, so there are occasions when a coupon that is meant to come off is “stuck” for a bit, leading to some really nice deals. Amazon has patched this up lately, so these are becoming more and more rare, but still happen.
So, there is at least some “urgency” to these deals, since coupons will go poof, and the best deals will sell out in hours, if not minutes. Hence, the affectionate nickname – “Operation Pussycat – time to pounce”.
These releases include thousands of deals, often breaking 10K. On the backend these are pre-filtered to exclude anything with a low discount, and banned categories/sellers, etc. Discounts from Typical vs List price are accounted for with different minimums. So some categories may have a minimum of 30% discount from Typical price, and 50% from List, and some may have 50% from Typical and as much as 80% from List as a requirement to qualify. Categories “of interest” get lower requirements than truly random junk.
I am constantly tweaking filters to find a good balance of stuff people are actually looking for vs random deeply discounted junk, so this is still very much a work in progress, but like i said – it’s been catching some good stuff lately.
Automated announcement should go up tonight right after wave one of the upload finishes, so……. be ready to pounce 🙂
