I strongly suspect its intentional. If you search for something on Amazon and then sort by price (lowest), unlike other sites the first few multiple pages of th

I strongly suspect its intentional. If you search for something on Amazon and then sort by price (lowest), unlike other sites the first few multiple pages of the results will be of very cheap related products but not the exact one you are searching for. Ex: if you search for ‘shoes’ and then change sort from featured to price, your first few pages will be things like shoes laces, shoe polish, shoe soles etc. This is totally unlike how things are on other shopping sites. (Try this on amazon vs Walmart) This achieves two things from amazons point of view: 1. More often than users will be trained to go with featured. 2. It gives amazon the advantage of putting whatever they want in featured. So amazon has successfully placed itself between the seller and the customer and modified user behavior so they (usually) go with what amazon wants you to buy (featured items) vs what you want to buy (cheaper items)