My interpretation, possibly missing something, is that these e-commerce sites are a long tail play. They have lots of peoples time committed to work on this, s

My interpretation, possibly missing something, is that these e-commerce sites are a long tail play. They have lots of peoples time committed to work on this, so why not build a network of random Shopify sites that sell stuff you can get elsewhere for cheaper? Most stuff won’t sell, but the things that will return a disproportionate return relative to the effort.