🤔 RUFUS is taking the imagination out of the equation to give results.

What I thought was true at the beginning of the year when Amazon launched its first demo of what RUFUS would be for shoppers is not what I'm experiencing right now.

After seeing their press release, it looked like RUFUS was going to direct customers to specific products from a conversational prompt, cutting the browsing stage of search and potentially matching intent with a product in seconds.

🪄 It sounded like magic, but after some thought, it was going to be more like dark evil magic because it was going to mean the end of search and ranking as we know it.

And without search and ranking, how are we supposed to sell on Amazon?

Glad you asked! Let me tell you.

What Rufus is doing right now is removing the mental energy customers need to use to translate their intent to a specific search term.

For example, I'm going to a wedding this weekend in Florida, and I need a new dress (always a new one), so mentally, I need to do the exercise of thinking about what I want exactly because the keyword "dress" is too broad.

So I might go to Pinterest or TikTok or Instagram to find some inspiration. Once I get it, I'll go back to Amazon and type "pink ruffle dress"

This is too long of a process when you have a personal shopper at your fingertips a.k.a RUFUS.

Now, I can tell RUFUS all about my trip, the wedding, the vibe, the weather, and based on all of its fashion knowledge and what it knows about me, it will give me recommendations in a SEARCH format.

The results were:

"Floral Ruffle Maxi Dress for Wedding"
"Yellow Ruffle Midi Dress for Wedding"
"Blue Ruffle Wrap Dress for Wedding"
"Pink Ruffle A-line Dress for Wedding"
"Print Ruffle Fit & Flare Dress for Wedding"

It feels like good magic.

The revolution for the selling experience is all about CONTEXT.

Ranking and indexing for long tail keywords with much context about the occasion, feature, function, audience, location, event, and activity. Pretty much all the functions COSMO was built for.

Broad generic search terms are (I think) going to be things of the past or at least be less impactful than context-rich keywords.

So, building listings in the new era of AI is about providing as many details as possible and ranking for specific, long-tail keywords.

What are your thoughts on this one? Is Rufus the future of search we’ve been waiting for?