Is Amazon Always the Cheapest? What ~100 Real UK Price Checks Showed (2026)

"It's on Amazon, it's probably the cheapest" is one of the most expensive assumptions in UK shopping. We wanted to test it with real behaviour rather than a hand-picked basket, so we looked at the recent anonymised price checks from our own WEM Price Compare browser extension — roughly a hundred product views where UK shoppers were on an actual Amazon or eBay product page and the extension compared that listing against other marketplaces in real time.

A quick honesty note on method: this is a small, early sample from real users of a new extension, not a laboratory study — and we filter out junk matches (accessories, implausible prices, counterfeit-prone sources) before counting anything as a "saving". What follows is directional, but it is directional from genuine shopping moments rather than a marketing basket.

The headline: the first price was frequently beatable

In the majority of checks where we found the same product elsewhere, there was a cheaper legitimate listing than the page the shopper was on. Most gaps were modest — a few pounds on toiletries and household goods — but the tail was substantial. The standouts from real checks: an Oral-B iO5 electric toothbrush around £45 cheaper on eBay than the page price; a Ring battery video doorbell with a £45 gap; a NIVEA SPF spray nearly £3 cheaper for the identical bottle; a Stanley Quencher tumbler with a high-street-sized gap on the same colourway.

The pattern behind the big gaps is consistent: branded items with strong recognition (Oral-B, Ring, Stanley, Calvin Klein) where Amazon's listing sits at or near RRP while eBay carries brand-new stock from UK retailers and clearance sellers at genuinely lower prices. The "Brand New" filter on eBay is doing a lot of quiet work for UK shoppers in 2026.

When Amazon does win

Amazon won plenty of checks too, and the categories are predictable: fast-moving everyday items where Amazon's own retail price is aggressive (think mainstream tech accessories and consumables on Subscribe & Save), anything where delivery speed matters and Prime is already paid for, and lightning-deal windows during sales events. Amazon also remains the easiest returns experience in UK retail, which is worth real money on items you are not sure about.

The point is not "Amazon is expensive". It is that Amazon's position on any given product is unpredictable enough that checking costs you ten seconds and not checking costs you, on the evidence of real shopper sessions, somewhere between £2 and £45 a time.

What we deliberately do not count as a saving

• Accessory listings masquerading as the product — a "case for" the thing you are viewing is not a cheaper version of the thing.
• Prices below 30% of the page price — at that gap the listing is almost never the same product, so we treat it as a mismatch rather than a deal.
• Counterfeit-prone platforms for heavily-faked brands — a fake at half price is not a price.
• Out-of-stock and pre-order listings dressed as available stock.

These filters matter because the comparison space is noisy by default. The first version of any price-matching system happily reports a four-figure "saving" by matching a gaming laptop to a £25 accessory — we know, because ours briefly did, and the fix is exactly the filter list above. A comparison is only useful if every line of it is the genuine article.

How to run this check yourself

The free WEM Price Compare extension for Chrome and Edge does this automatically: open a product on Amazon or eBay and, if a cheaper legitimate listing exists across the marketplaces we compare, it appears on the page — no copy-pasting product names into search boxes. WEM is funded by disclosed affiliate commission; prices are identical whether you click through us or not, and checkout always happens on the retailer. Or do it manually: search the exact product name plus model number on eBay with the "Brand New" filter before paying the Amazon price. Either way, stop assuming. The data says the assumption has a price.