It only shows what people are buying, not what they want to buy. Cheap crap might sell a ton because it's cheap and listed at the top of the search results. Which then feeds into it being kept at the top of the search results. A lot of times if the item is cheap enough people don't bother with returns and rather just throw the item out, something that will go completely unseen by the metrics.

Ratings are also not very helpful because they are manipulated in a variety of ways. Things like bots/mechanical turks, putting offers in the package to give people money back if they rate the item 5 stars, or hijacking a well rated product listing by changing it later or taking advantage of item variants system.

So, I very much don't trust any of their data myself.

I don't think its so easy to pull apart what people are buying and what they want to buy.

Amazon has a pretty crippling hold on the online retail industry, and they collect massive amounts of data to decide what to put in front of people.

Targeted marketing and the partnership between marketing and psychology is nothing new, it has gotten stronger though. I have a hard time looking at a market run like that as a roughly free market where the successful products indicate what buyers actually want rather than what they were best coerced (or "nudged") into buying.

> Amazon’s relentless quantitative focus

It’s 2025 and I still get the “I see you bought a stapler, what you obviously desire is twenty-five more staplers” treatment from Amazon.