> 1. Think of Amazon as a search engine for products.

That's difficult to do when their search is so atrociously bad. It ignores keywords and places matches well down the page, if it displays them at all.

Plus the classic 'choose a department to enable sorting' prompt. 30 years and their programmers can't work out how to order items from different 'departments'. Why should a customer have to know about their internal taxonomy?

It's probably better to think of Amazon as a product promotion engine. What the customer thinks they want is less important than what Amazon wants to sell.