Cyber – My Game Reviews

Amazon Rufus is changing shopping on Cyber Monday

Cyber Monday Sales — Photo by Karola G on Pexels.com

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.

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.
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.
Customers are able to Auto-Buy based on price changes, allowing for people to spend more time on other aspects of their holidays.
Customers are saving time shopping.
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.

Google Search and the Paywall: A consequence of near monopolistic power

Google is a company that has been controlling the search market in its grip for well over 20 years at this point. While the company offers many convenient services, it has also become a monopoly. Some people would disagree with that but the company is one and also is also dominating in mobile phones with the android operating system. There is a need for the internet to untangle from this monopolistic system that Google has made. Just for the interests of keeping the internet interesting and useful for many types of people, that is important. However, one of the main reasons why I am focusing on this issue is because of paywalls on news sites.

Paywalls used to be rarer in the past. Only really the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) had them in a significant way. However, as time has gone on and the internet went from a place for bragging rights to a necessity for someone to be able to have a journalism career, paywalls have been going up across cyberspace. The building of walls across the internet feels like an admission of failure of the internet’s ability to reduce the cost of producing news. I have seen it in real-time here; this is not a change that one sees through generations but it happened after 2008 and we have seen more and more paywalls.

Google’s inability to categorize paywalls is huge issue. Their unwillingness to categorize websites to make it more useful to the public shows their institutional inertia. The company makes billions upon billions of dollars on advertising, yet it is unable to even pay attention to its search engine that made it popular in the 2000s.

Why is Google so unwilling to change?

It’s because they are comfortable in taking ad revenue from sites. Changing that revenue stream would make them take a hit and they can only tolerate having more and more revenue streaming into it.

If Google was to take its search engine seriously, it would take a hit to its reputation. It would have to respond to all the calls about it having a monopoly on the internet and manipulating people’s minds. They would have to make the legacy outlets which seek to maintain their power have to play by the rules rather just allowing them to regurgitate what the ruling parties want to see.

Paywalled sites do need to not show up in the search results. Many of these sites are business sites that often hide their arcane language away from public view. The internet should be divided up into small kingdoms where you have to pay entry fees to get into the castle.

Google’s unwillingness to categorize such things show that monopolies that hold onto power for so long have a way of shaping the whole culture around them. The internet, once free and vibrant, is becoming yet another shopping mall where everything has a price.

Having free access to information on the internet isn’t a right but essential aspect to cyberspace.

Yamibuy-An Upstart marketplace for Asian Groceries

While sites such as Temu and Shein get all the attention, there other upstart e-commerce sites. Some like AliExpress, are just getting people’s attention. However, some are literally under the radar, such as the site I am going to talk about, Yamibuy, an ecommerce site devoted to higher quality Asian products.

Yamibuy, an entrance towards Chagee Tea.

The reason why I stumbled upon Yamibuy was because I saw a video about Chagee tea online. This video was on YouTube, and it came up on my recommended feed and I was intrigued as I am a big tea consumer. However, most of my exposure to tea was through an American brand known as Herbal Essences. This is a brand that began in the heady days of the New Age culture of the 1960s era. However, the taste is getting a bit stale now even though its great but I always had an opinion that Chinese tea was better.

Chagee Tea is a competitor to Starbucks Coffee in China. Along with Lunkin Coffee, these two giants of modern Chinese culture are challenging the American coffee chain with a uniquely Chinese twist.

Chagee Tea is really my interest here and they have some interesting flavors available for sale. They have Peach Oolong Tea and Ceylon Black Tea among others. While Chagee is focusing on their Milk tea, they also have Pure Teas available to the public.

Some of these Pure Teas are only available Yamibuy.

So I made a choice to create an account on Yamibuy.

Is YamiBuy better than Temu?

In my opinion, YamiBuy is a better store than Temu. Currently, Temu is all about prices not about the quality. YamiBuy is giving people options and that is what makes it better than most other Chinese websites that engage in global ecommerce.

One thing that Yami does better than Temu is that they are so aggressive at advertising. While I understand why Temu in its early days needed to have more aggressive advertising in order to get attention in an already saturated with many competitors.

In comparison, YamiBuy is focused on getting Asian products to Asian Americans.

Temu has been focusing on essentially being a flea market for many types of customers. This has been diluting the brand of Temu and made it more difficult for it to be more than a flea market for many customers.

Building a reputation rather than just selling things is what is important in ecommerce.

What Yami shows a shift in Ecommerce

In the beginning, Ecommerce was dominated by American companies. As time has gone on, it seems that there is going to be more diversification in what companies are available online.

Amazon is going to be the Walmart of the Online store space. There will be a place for sites such Yami.

In my opinion, that makes the internet more interesting and more efficient to use for customers as well as businesses of many shapes and sizes.

Yami is a great site to use

I would recommend using Yami honestly. If you are Asian-American, such a site is must to have if you do not have a H-Mart or other Asian grocery nearby in your area. Managing to stumble upon it has made my ecommerce experience a bit more diverse than just using Amazon Prime for everything.

Considering that Chagee’s Tea was only on there. I would recommend it to get just a hint of the taste of this up-and-coming teahouse in America.