Personally, Amazon is where I go to check prices after I've decided what it is I'm buying. I've never gone to Amazon without knowing exactly what I wanted.

Your experience doesn’t jibe with market realities. Merchants play all sort of games to be the number one listed search result when you are searching for something generic like “headphones”.

Who actually searches for such a short tail term and expects good results? Does anyone ever google the term “cars” when they want to buy a car? More likely it’s a term like “8 seat SUV” or something more focused. Maybe headphones are different though..

And the first non advertising link is car.com where I can search for specific cars. Now Google has lost a customer and car.com has gained one. Now I can advertise on car.com and get a much better targeted advertising.

I never start a product search on Amazon unless I know the exact product I want. With headphones, I’d be likely to care about reviews in audiophile magazines long before I’d enter the noise of Amazon. I don’t generally use Amazon for product discovery, but except perhaps for paper books and I want related titles to something.

As long as your happy paying a premium in many cases for consistency. Certainly a lot of the marketplace stuff can be found outside of Amazon for cheaper as the merchant has an extra 15% to play with gong direct.

Most people are happy to pay a premium for the convenience - as evidenced by all of the third party merchants who sell on Amazon even though setting up a website to sell merchandise is trivial even for someone who knows nothing about websites.