Amazon Rufus is changing shopping on Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday Sales
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Cyber Monday is here, and it is in many ways bigger than Black Friday in some ways. In the past, Black Friday and the days before Christmas used to hog all the attention. Now, with Amazon’s dominance in ecommerce, Cyber Week and Cyber Monday have become more important than the shopping in the physical stores. This was a slow process but it really began with the Pandemic when people got more used to shopping online.

People were already having these habits before the pandemic, but Amazon and many ecommerce shops were able to fulfill a need for many consumers.

Amazon Rufus along with other shopping chatbots are changing the way we shop and leading to higher sales. Companies need to take advantage of generative AI. Most chatbots in the past were only really good at specific questions. The new generation of generative AI is helping to make shopping more precise and personal in a way the old model of searching and scrolling was unable to accomplish here.

Shopping AI is truly a big change for shoppers.

  1. They can now check prices month to month. This was only available on select sites, not its more holistic and you type in about any product without old style searching here.
  2. There is more of a move towards frictionless commerce. Shoppers can spend more time on the quality of the product instead of going through search bars and inconsistent search engines.
  3. Customers are able to Auto-Buy based on price changes, allowing for people to spend more time on other aspects of their holidays.
  4. Customers are saving time shopping.
  5. Shops now have to focus on quality not just getting on search results on the sites.

Many business owners are now seeing that Search Engine Optimization on Amazon and other search sites has to have an element of quality in your product.

Customer Reviews are now more important than before. As Rufus is collecting these reviews to make a summary, you need to make sure that your products are reviewing well now. Whereas before customers may not scroll to see reviews, they will see them in the summaries.

Quality matters not just gaming the SEO game.

I hope that stores realize the important power of shopping AI and make the shopping experience more enjoyable.

How to stay safe shopping online this holiday season? Stay away from fake websites

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.com

Since I started shopping online, I have noticed that scams have been increasing more than before. There have been so many hackers attacking websites, stealing data, sending social engineering emails which trick you. There are so many threats to keep track of in this age; the average citizen has no clue as to what to focus their energy on to keep the money in their wallets.

The sliest trick: The Fake Website Email or Message

In the early days of the internet, most hackers tended to focus on the inexperience of the users. As users got more comfortable with using the internet, they became even more cunning, attempting to weaponize what they saw as their home in cyberspace.

The culture we have now in cyberspace is under attack from all sides. We have outages happening more often than even in the 1990s. These outages are occurring almost every month, affecting economies.

The hackers and scammers are damaging the economy to gain an advantage. You should be steely prepared for scams throughout the holiday season.

The most important scam you be aware of is this one: the fake website.

The fake website is very common scam that hackers use but it is probably one of the most insidious out there and I have even come close to falling for it, almost giving a hacker some of the money in my bank account here.

The main aspect you need to consider is to look at the address in the email or message sent to you here.

You must check the address carefully. If the address is saying that it is from the official site and has the “.com” in it, then it should be a legitimate email or message.

However, if the address looks really strange and not like an official address, you should not be clicking any links in the message. Generally speaking, the strangeness is that address has not form or structure in here.

You should also watch for the emails that aim to copy the style of the website. Some of the details are not authentic to the actual website.

Check your original website emails and then compare them to these emails. If they look sketchy, then they are.

With these steps, you will be able to stay safe this holiday season.

What Empire Earth has that Civilization VII still doesn’t have

Civilization VII right before Thanksgiving has only around 7.5 thousand players right now playing it on Steam.

I have already talked about how Civilization VII was a failure and the game is basically the dark ages of the Civilization franchise. The dark ages of course had brightness in it, such as in Charlemagne’s court. Civilization VII burned brightly at the beginning as so many games do and it fails to continue capturing people’s attention.

I watched with great interest at how Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 and Civilization VII would perform together as they were released close to one another.

They are different genres, but they are both historical games with have audiences that overlap.

It is a tale of two games. Both burn brightly upon release but they are not the same. Kingdom Come 2, in spite of there being a high skill ceiling for this game, managed to tell an interesting story in 15th Century Bohemia and give a narrative from many class perspectives.

Civilization VII simply seems like an entry in a franchise which is exhausted in energy.

The game should have been pc-centric not console centric as it seems that it was. The willingness to put the game in VR makes no sense for a series that has largely been on the PC. Its soul began on the PC, and the console versions were a necessary addition but the main part of the franchise’s energy.

Empire Earth has what a lot of what the gaming industry doesn’t have now. The energy and the soul which makes it special here.

The importance of a holistic integration of many gameplay and design elements into a video game is vital for keeping it going in the memories of gamers.