Their most profitable business by margin is “advertising” (or sponsored/enshittified search results), and seller fees (which are typically 40-50% of item cost) are a massive profit center too.

They mostly stopped selling loss makers (like heavy liquid beverages) or hiked the prices on them (like after they drove Diapers.com out of business) years ago.

Also people ignore that they are providing services for the sellers themselves, not just the consumers. For some people they just rather you buy their shit off Amazon, because they ship them the bulk goods and forget the consumers exist.

Amazon handles everything and provides a real service to those businesses, even if they're overall the big evil Amazon. They managed to automate the fuck out of the online marketplace so they do that for everyone.

Otherwise you have to make a website, take online orders, process shipments, handle warehousing, process returns... Amazon became the de facto middleman by turning every business into the same day shipping sort of business.

I don't hate them for doing that. But I do think they're a symptom of a bigger disease in America.