Honestly thats exactly why its genius Amazons inline video ads arent some random annoyance theyre a masterclass in subtle marketing Youre already in a buying mindset actively browsing products so these ads hit when youre most receptive
Hahahahah. Receptive. Sure. When I'm wasting half an hour or more of my time trying to find a very specific product that meets very specific requirements and can be delivered in a tight timeframe, I'm going to be happily distracted by an ad and say, "Oh, maybe I should buy toilet paper, too." If Amazon's search didn't suck harder than a black hole, maybe, but as long as it's an uphill battle just to buy things on Amazon, and as long as 75% of my purchases end up with me doing a carefully tailored Google search to get to the products that I'm trying to buy instead of the higher-margin, but useless products that they're trying to push, their ads are just going to piss me off even more.
Instead of waiting for you to leave and maybe forget what you wanted Amazon reminds you of complementary items you might genuinely need
I leave when I make a purchase or conclude that I could not find what I needed. And every extra distraction that gets in the way of finding what I needed makes the latter more likely than the former. It's self-defeating. See also my comment above about seeing products locked in a cage and giving up before someone came to unlock it and ordering it on Amazon. If Amazon becomes too inconvenient, I'll buy it on AliExpress.com or Walmart.com instead.
Its targeted its efficient and it often saves you the mental effort of searching for alternatives
Do you know, out of all the times I've shopped at Amazon, what percentage of the time an alternative was worth considering? I always have a list of requirements, and products that don't meet all of those requirements are of no value to me. When I'm looking for 6mmx30mm hex pan head machine screws, knowing that Amazon also has 5mmx30mm machine screws and 6mmx30mm countersink Phillips screws is of no value, because I need the exact product that I'm searching for. Again, all that does is make it more likely for me to leave and buy it somewhere else.
Maybe 1% of the time, I don't know exactly what I'm looking for. And even then, I know enough to reject large swaths of products in a particular space. What's missing is the "Don't ever show me products like this one again" button. That's what makes Amazon so miserable is that there are so many hundreds of vendors selling the exact same products with different name badges, and you can't find the legitimate products by established vendors for all the dross.
You could see it as bombarding but really its just smart datadriven commerce making the shopping experience more complete and if you think about it sometimes you discover stuff you didnt even know you wanted
And I've literally never, in all the years I've spend many thousands of dollars per year on Amazon, bought anything because of any of that. So clearly it doesn't work, it isn't smart, and it isn't data-driven, because if it were, they would have realized that they're just wasting my time and pissing me off, and they would have stopped showing me that crap.