Future of Shopping or a Total Flop?
Product Strategy
Understand of Rufus
Rufus is Amazon’s New AI assistant which will help you with all kinds of answers for any question while shopping.
This will help you in
Complex Search Queries or Shopping by Occasion or Purpose
Finding the best recommendations
Finding the information about the Product on the Product Detail Page
Are People really looking for Information on Amazon or they will still go for Google?
People think of Google as the place where they can find information about anything and everything.
People think of Amazon as the place where they can purchase anything and everything.
Amazon launched Rufus, it seems as if Amazon is trying to be Google of Ecommerce or Ecommerce Browser.
Amazon trying to be the Google of E-commerce?
Customers spend a lot of time doing research before making a purchase and they do the research on Google, once they are confident about the Product or build an intent, they come to Amazon to purchase. That’s where Amazon wants to go up in the funnel and wants users to do research on Amazon itself for 2 main reasons
The top of the recall is controlled by Google
Amazon has to pay a lot of advertisement money to rank top of the order.
But the question which Amazon has to ponder about is —
Will people trust Amazon with the transparency of the information about the research for any Product?
Will people think, are they missing something if they are not researching on Google? or Have they shortened the Universe of the information by doing it on Amazon?
Why Amazon is pushing Rufus?
Amazon is pushing Rufus aggressively as part of Bottom Navigation which is a Prime Real Estate for any E-commerce Platform.
Let’s think about what should come in Bottom Navigation ( Bottom Nav ). we can think of a 2 X 2 where
One axis will present features that are used very frequently and less frequently and
Another axis will represent the features which are the core Need state and some that have peripheral need state or functionality.
Comment below if Rufus should be the Part of bottom Navigation or not?
Why Rufus is not there, just beside the search bar?
May be people will see as another mode of search only, there will not be starc difference which people can think of
Is Rufus Really helpful?
Why People are very apprehensive about adopting Rufus?
These are some of the reasons which I can think of- (Feel free to add yours in the comment section)
People become resistant to any new change and people have developed some mental model while searching for something on the e-commerce platform over the years, they will take some time to adapt to this new experience.
Is Rufus making shopping easy or more time-consuming, The majority of people start their shopping journey with Broader intent. But Rufus is more useful in Complex Search Queries ( Show me skincare routine for Dubai ). People will prefer normal search over Rufus for Query like Sunscreen (Broader Search Intent) because using Rufus for broader search Query is time-consuming.
People first research and then come onto the platform, probably they don't trust Amazon as a platform for the research part, they still trust Google.
Rufus is directly competing with the main Search, users are seeing this as a distraction rather than as complementing the main Search.
Still Rufus can see a good early adoption/traction due to novelty factor but will the metrics hold for next 8–10 Months is the question.
How can it be helpful??
Many people think of conversational commerce as a typical chatbot type of experience, but shouldn’t it be an interactive and blended shopping experience rather than a Chatbot Experience?
Rufus can be really helpful in the following manner.
Rufus should be extremely blended with the Search rather than competing with Search. There shouldn’t be separate entry points because for users it’s all about search, it’s not about Simple Search vs Complex Search.
Rufus should help users at different points in the shopping journey ( assisting users on the Product List Page for Search Results refinement, Product Detail Pages for Multimodel Search etc, this is important because less than 1% of users will start their shopping journey solely via Rufus. In a typical Search, people get results in one go, and they can see an ample amount of results via search but in the case of Rufus, only limited results are there.
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