Black Friday hits a record

[Graybeard]

Black Friday hits a record $74.4B in sales online, up 5% on last year | TechCrunch

The momentum of Thanksgiving — which saw consumers spend a record $33.6 billion spent globally online on the day — looks like it continued into Black

techcrunch.com

5% is that adjusted for inflation as compared to the volume last year?

Chatbots continue to figure as a theme. Adobe said that traffic to retail sites from GenAI chatbots was up by 1,800% last year, although you have to remember that they would have been considerably more rare, and less functional, last year. Adobe said that it in a survey it did of 5,000 consumers in the U.S., 20% said they were using chatbots to find deals and other shopping recommendations. Whether chatbot creators leverage that to build out advertising will be an interesting development to watch. In the meantime, it definitely points to one more way that chatbots are threatening to upend discovery through search engines.

Things are changing rapidly

 

[azgold]

I thought Black Friday was last week, so I didn't contribute.

Word from the Opposition Party in our House of Commons is that you guys are faring far better than us, so maybe people have a little more money this year? Plus a lot more people to spend it?

I think the Pandemic rewired our brains for shopping from home over going to a brick and mortar store, too.

 

[Graybeard]

Well, I found the chatbot part to be the most interesting.

Actually, I used ChatGPT for investigating buying a solar generator.

Not so much as finding the best price, I think I already did, about 50% off the suggested price. I was looking towards building a larger scope system utilizing my electric vehicle (BEV) for 40KW storage. The main battery pack (traction battery) is the size of about 2.5 Tesla Powerwalls, with the objective being to survive any power outages, Trumpistan, or the proverbial apocalypse.

DALL-E
Silly car sits in the garage and I have spent $10.00 recharging it with grid current.

The point of this all, is that ChatGPT can look up products either from its database or live on the internet, and point out features specifications and uses to you.

All of this in 1/10 of the time you would spend going through numerous websites from a search engine query. That's really a harbinger of what's going to happen, whether you are prepared for it or not.

AI is moving up the adoption curve very quickly and the article's reference to this caught my eye.

 

[bulkcheapservice]

Amd here i was told people dont have money.

 

[Fabian_Bau]

I feel so silly. I still use review sites and forums to find information before buying something. I use them at work but not at home. I don’t even know why it turned out that way!

 

[azgold]

I feel so silly. I still use review sites and forums to find information before buying something. I use them at work but not at home. I don’t even know why it turned out that way!

Me, too. Well, I don't use a chatbot for anything (at least not knowingly) but I do still read reviews.

Sounds like I need to drag myself into the whole AI thing. For me at this juncture of my life, I just never felt that I needed it.

 

[Graybeard]

A good example of AI's use in reviews would be Amazon's implementation of Rufus AI which basically is using the Amazon's customer reviews as its learning data or corpus.

The advantage is, at least theoretically, is that Amazon's Rufus AI is acting on bona-fide customer reports of products rather than some affiliate's ulterior motive monetization. Of course, there are other review sites where the reviews are not made for the purpose of making money from referrals.

I have been using Rufus at Amazon quite a bit lately just for the speed of filtering through reviews without actually reading them. The time savings is enormous. Bottom line, the strategy of customer review sites and SEO is going to evaporate in a matter of a short time.

 

[Graybeard]

Here is an example (for a tablet I just bought):

Minimizes the Rufus conversation window when you change pages
Get started
Are there any reported issues with wifi connectivity?
The product description doesn't mention any issues with Wi-Fi connectivity. It states the tablet offers versatile connectivity options including dual-band Wi-Fi (2.4GHz/5GHz) and Bluetooth 5.0.
How responsive is its touchscreen interface?
While the product description doesn't mention specifics about touchscreen responsiveness, it does state the Rebecco tablet uses an IPS Incell fully laminated display. This display technology typically provides better touch responsiveness compared to traditional LCD screens. However, customer reviews would provide more insight into the actual touchscreen performance.

 

[azgold]

Okay....so are you saying that it answers your product questions? Maybe that's why Amazon no longer posts question responses.

I always start reading at the one star, to see possible issues. Many of the 4 and 5 star ratings, well I have no idea how they got those.

 

[Graybeard]

Are you on a desktop? Scroll down this page below the Rufus AI part and you will see they still are posting the questions and answers if you want to read all of that. This is just an example page and what you see on mobile may differ from desktop.

Amazon.com

Rufus offers a certain advantage in that it aggregates the most commonly asked questions by shoppers and then searches the reviews for those that match the pattern of the highlighted question.

I'm still working on my solar backup emergency system. Now I'm looking for used or surplus solar panels in Facebook Marketplace not too far from me. One of the rare uses for Facebook that is not a total waste of time.

 

[azgold]

I checked your link. That thing sells for $45 US, $72 CDN.

Are you on a desktop?

Laptop, yeah.

I assume you mean this area:

Fair but you can't see what people are asking about, nor the responses unless you know what search word to use. I have, in the past, tried just typing a letter, usually a vowel and see what questions come up. Previously, you could read the list.

Now, you can see an answer if you ask a question and I don't even know if you can do that anymore, haven't tried in a very long time.

 

[azgold]

I have seen the summaries that are now posted but you have to be logged in to see those, maybe, not sure. The ones I've read so far do not at all reflect the issues of a product, it just points out the great things about it.

 

[Graybeard]

US and the CA differ maybe? This screenshot is from Firefox

Click on the 1 star I get this

 

[azgold]

Yup, that's what I can see in the Canadian, too. I still come across products that don't seem to have one, maybe not enough reviews or just not done yet, I dunno.

That one in your screenshot is the first I've seen where any issues were mentioned despite the reviews talking about problems.