Black Friday is one of the most anticipated shopping events of the year that offers huge discounts and enticing deals on different products, but the excitement it offers can easily lead to overspending, poor purchasing decisions, and even regrets.

To make the most of Black Friday without falling into common traps, it’s important to approach the sales strategically and avoid the pitfalls that can turn a great deal into a costly mistake.

Here are five things to avoid to ensure a successful and stress-free shopping experience.

1. Shopping without a budget

The first thing to do if you do not want to make a costly mistake on Black Friday is to shop without having a budget. You can easily overspend due to the exciting offers you get from the retailers and lose control of your spending.

To stay in control of your spending, create a shopping list of what you truly need and stick to it. If you’re not sure about an item, ask yourself if you Would buy the item at full price, and if the answer is no, it’s likely not worth it.

2. Falling for the ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Schemes

Although the “buy now, pay later” option is one of the ways you can save more, especially if you are shopping in this festive time due to its payment flexibility option it can also put you in a financial hole come January.

It is important you understand what you are signing in for because if you fail to pay on time, it can accumulate even more debt.

3. Impulsively Spending

Black Friday is a great opportunity to buy the things you need at a discount price, but that discount can lead to regret later if you don’t deal with impulsively spending.

Retailers design sales to tempt you into buying items you don’t need by using flashy discounts, countdown clocks on websites, or listing the number of items left in stock—to trick consumers into splurging. To avoid these tricks, have a budget

4. Not Checking the Original Price of Items

Another common error is ignoring price comparisons, thinking you are taking the product for a good price, whereas some retailers inflate the “original price” of an item to make the discount look more significant.

Before you buy an item, check multiple stores to see if competitors have better offers

5. Return policies

Finally, you should also look out for the return policies because some Black Friday purchases often come with non-refundable policies, especially for electronics or clearance gadgets. Always keep your receipts and ensure you understand the return or exchange conditions before finalizing a purchase.

According to EFCC, Nigeria as a nation till date has lost over $500m
due to Cybercrime.

This will suggest that the loss as of today’s date is likely to be at least 20% higher as
more sophisticated cybercrime tools are now available and because of the
advancement in artificial intelligence, audio spoofing etc.

Cybercrime is criminal activity that either targets or uses a computer, a computer
network, or a networked device to gain access to finances or to steal or ransomware
or to compromise sensitive data.

Cybercrime is also perpetuated to disrupt computer networks and blackmail an
organisation into paying out agreed sums to get their network, for political or
personal reasons and can be carried out by individuals or organizations.

As sophisticated as some western countries such as United States, Australia,
Germany, France, UK etc with tools such as Firewalls, Endpoint Detection Systems,
Zero Trust, 2-Factor authentication right now it still seems like a lost battle.

Traditional methods of protecting IT networks and data such as firewalls, zero trust
and two-factor authentication based on authenticating twice on the same device, etc.,
are failing to provide the required protection for our digital assets or IT landscape.

Imagine if we undertook an exercise (with written permission) to conduct a security
penetration test of most of the leading consumer software applications used daily by
most of our society, I believe the findings would be very revealing.

Nigeria is now gradually becoming a victim country, however there are ways,
methods, and techniques to impede data theft & ransomware crimes and provide
100% security for all data as follows.

3 or 4 -Factor encryption of all data, files of any kind, (text, images & video)
at rest to include biometrics such as facial recognition or using your
fingerprint to unlock access viewing all sensitive data.

Automatic back up of data at file or row data level, wherever the data resides
on a personal PC, in the cloud, on a server machine which now provides
100% recoverability.

Migrate or convert data held in spreadsheets to a secure encrypted database
application.

Using Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Software Robotics and
Powerful Programming Languages to write customised software applications
that can proactively detect, defend, and attack cyber criminals in their stride.

Cybersecurity Ventures estimated “global cybercrime costs to grow by 15 percent
per year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025, up
from $3 trillion USD in 2015.

Cyber Crime represents the greatest transfer of economic wealth in history, risks the
incentives for innovation and its growth rate is exponentially larger than the damage
inflicted from natural disasters in a single year, and will be more profitable than the
global trade of all major illegal drugs combined.”

The above statistics are clearly very concerning, industry practitioners, cybersecurity
product providers and practitioners certainly need to communicate more and
collaborate on research and development to discover, invent and establish new
products, services and techniques to combat cybercrime.

Current methods or complacency would result in many such new headliners, we
need to act fast and Nigeria as a nation is clearly no exception.

Author – Valentine Waturuocha
Valentine Waturuocha is the Chief Technology Officer/Founder of TEMSCONSU
(www.temsconsu.com) and is the inventor of Excelitte (www.excelitte.com – A Cyber Security
Toolset that has all the features mentioned in the article), PMPplanner – (www.pmpplanner.com – A Project Management Toolset that has features than none other has), Omnium Lite –
(www.temscorp.com – A DevOps TEM Toolset).

Valentine started his career over 25 years ago after completing an MSC degree in City University London, with a focused practical dissertation in Computer & Internet Security.

Valentine also completed a mini- business studies program at Harvard University Boston in 2007 and is a member of the Harvard Business Review Group.

Valentine has either led or been involved at a decision-making level in successfully delivering a combined value of over $300 million worth of project value to various organisations globally in the last 10 years or so.

In the past 5 years he has also consulted or advised federal, state & local government depts in Australia, the United States, EMEA regions, etc on Cybersecurity, DevOps, E-Government.

ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Co-Pilot is also creating a growing problem that can be likened to the equivalent of mini scams getting perpetuated globally.

So here we go again just like the year 2000 millennium bug issue which got ‘scare mongered’ into creating a knee-jerk reaction that led to an estimated global spend of over $460 billion so.

Artificial Intelligence specifically Generative AI (the underpinning technology for ChatGPT) now overhyped/exaggerated by VCs and information Technology Wannabe experts to dominate social media channels and news headlines.

AI is now put forward as a solution looking for a problem to solve which is one of the fundamental reasons that 85% to 95% of IT Software Projects fail globally.

Even when IT Software Projects are passed off as successful and the software application is implemented, most times it is still riddled with hundreds of bugs, cannot be upgraded or maintained easily or seamlessly, etc.

The previous point will explain the number of times in 2024 alone, GTB, Zenith, Access banks online banking platforms have been off-line for days due to maintenance or upgrades to the systems.

Talking about AI Return on Investment, well for a lot of CIOs and C-Level decision makers, they are never going to get any ROI on any Artificial Intelligence investment, because of its current fad status.

It is almost impossible to derive any real-time value or profitable ROI when an information technology solution is deployed as a nice to have or because of all the hype, then it is now retrofitted to supposedly solve a business problem.

Other powerful forms of AI other than ChatGPT (which is premised on Natural Language Processing) such as Machine Learning (ML) use algorithms, large amounts of data, and computing power to find patterns in data and perform tasks like prediction, classification, etc.

Software applications such as Spotify or Netflix use AI/ML intelligence to predict & suggest new content based on your interests.

We developed a few years ago, an Artificial Intelligence Powered Inspection Software Mobile Application for a client.

The software application leveraged Machine Learning precepts to predict malfunctioning or
non-complaint inspected objects in an instant, and then send a notification to the repairer.

AI/ML is likely to provide a lot more value because of the wide range of business problems it can solve.

For example, in developing robots, machine learning is leveraged to teach/train the robots using large data sets to automate and perform specific human tasks across sectors including health care, manufacturing, transport, logistics, construction, etc.

AI/ML gives robots a computer vision that enables them to navigate, detect, and determine their reactions accordingly.

ChatGPT and Generative AI have certainly put Artificial Intelligence at the forefront of Information Technology today, which is helpful in terms of attracting more investment and research.

The overall encompassing concept of Artificial Intelligence, how it is applied to solve problems, and its overall use is mostly misunderstood which leaves room as you would expect for the financial exploitation of decision-makers and investors alike.

Let us not because of the Open AI revolution ignore or not pay enough attention to other Traditional types of AI such as Predictive Analytics, Image Recognition etc.

Traditional AI is equally as important today as our society gallops along the current digital revolution.

We are guilty of focusing too much on the areas that are currently in the news at the risk of ignoring or not paying as much attention on other equally important items.

Robotics, Autonomous Vehicles and all manner of Automation underpinned by Traditional AI are contributing immensely to our current evolution as a society and also needs the relevant focus and support.

AI is no different from other Information technology concepts such as Web 3.0, IOT, Metaverse, blockchain, Quantum Computing, Hyper Automation, etc, but without applying it to fully established requirements, you get a white elephant project.

Author – Valentine Waturuocha

Valentine Waturuocha is the Chief Technology Officer/Founder of TEMSCONSU
(www.temsconsu.com) and is the inventor of Excelitte (www.excelitte.com – A Cyber Security
Toolset that has all the features mentioned in the article ), PMPplanner –(www.pmpplanner.com – a Project Management Toolset that has features than none other has), Omnium Lite – (www.temscorp.com – A DevOps TEM Toolset).

Valentine has either led or been involved at a decision-making level in successfully delivering a combined value of over $300 million worth of project value to various organisations globally in the last 10 years or so.

In the past 5 years he has also consulted or advised federal, state & local government depts in Australia, the United States, EMEA regions, etc on Cybersecurity, DevOps, E-Government, Innovation, Technology Advancement/Empowerment policies, etc.

Forbes Articles – (https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/people/valentinewats/)
LinkedIn Profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/valentinewats/