Somehow it must be profitable, and is presumably intentional as they obviously fail at the most basic stuff and have done for years. They didn't always though.

Somehow it must be profitable, and is presumably intentional as they obviously fail at the most basic stuff and have done for years. They didn't always though. Search for a product, find 156 results. Sort by rating or price and it's now often something absurd like 6 results. Where did the rest go? No manager or dev ever noticed this when it's now impossible to shop there and not notice this? This seems like a great whiteboard interview question in our strange alternate timeline "how would you sort a list without losing well over 90% of the list?" Go back to the original search, tediously wade through the crap and realise none at all of these are the actual item you tried to find. Randomly click around a few of the shitty products shown. Find the actual product, often from the actual manufacturer with thousands of reviews, in the "customers who viewed this also viewed" or "customers eventually bought" lists. Question your sanity. Go back and check search. Nope, the actual item isn't there in the primary search at all. Just the shit. Fortunately for me at least, there aren't enough other forces to keep me there and I now mostly shop elsewhere. Sometimes it would be annoyingly easy to just Amazon it, but they're not even cheapest or fastest any more.