Is It Actually Cheaper to Order Everything from Amazon?S

Amazon's pretty much the go-to place for cheap gadgets, books, music, food, and just about everything else. But we wanted to see how much cheaper it really is compared to other stores. So, we tallied up a few shopping lists and compared.

Amazon is an incredibly easy way to shop and with a service like the $79 a year Amazon Prime, you get free two-day shipping...which makes buying mighty convenient. As a result, most of here at Lifehacker use Amazon for pretty much all of our shopping, from books and gadgets down to hand soap and other household items. Amazon is certainly easier to order from than walking over to an actual store, but that doesn't mean it's cheaper.

So, we decided to get down to brass tacks and compare Amazon to other retailers, using an unscientific mix of random items and actual shopping lists. We're skipping the taxes and shipping costs (or assuming you have Prime) for the sake of simplicity here, but the price overview should be about the same regardless of where you are. Obviously these items all tend to shift in price, but the general snapshot we grabbed did reveal a few trends. Here's what we found.

Household Items Compared: Amazon vs Walmart

Is It Actually Cheaper to Order Everything from Amazon?S

It's no secret that Amazon and Walmart are both on a race to the bottom for pricing of general household items, but we were still pretty surprised at how close the two were for most items. That said, a small study from last year by Kantar Retail found that Amazon was usually 20% more expensive than Walmart, and that trend seems to continue with a lot of the items we checked.

Our random collection of items showed that Walmart is about 15% cheaper than Amazon for household items. There were some general consistencies that we found. Walmart was cheaper for small appliances with the exception of the Cuisinart DCC-1200 coffee maker. The best example here is Walmart's price on the KitchenAid mixer, which is $60 cheaper than Amazon's price. For the most part Walmart's prices on small appliances, from dutch ovens to slow cookers were cheaper than Amazon.

For smaller items like batteries, tupperware, or Swiffer cloths, the price difference was negligible, but more often in favor of Amazon. Generally speaking, the benefit with Amazon is that you can get more of these types of items in bulk for cheaper, but if you're looking for smaller amounts you're not going to notice that big of a price difference.

For the most part, we'd say that Walmart tends to be cheaper than Amazon. Of course, the problem is that you usually need to walk into an actual Walmart location to get these deals because they're not offered online, which means you'll spend a significant amount of time wandering the aisles. Still, if money's your only concern, it looks like you're more often going to get a deal on household items at Walmart.

Gadgets Compared: Amazon vs Best Buy

Is It Actually Cheaper to Order Everything from Amazon?S

In 1990, the San Francisco 49ers destroyed the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXIV by a score of 55-10. That's the kind of blowout we saw here between Amazon and Best Buy, where Amazon absolutely destroyed Best Buy in pretty much every item we checked.

For the most part, this seems to be because Amazon changes their prices way more often than Best Buy, and that means they can mess around with the prices on items a lot more. Some items stuck pretty close to their retail pricing, like higher priced items such as the Epson PowerLite projector or anything from Apple, but everything else favored Amazon by a wide margin. Even items with less leeway for price reductions like the Logitech M510 mouse were also $15 cheaper on Amazon. We stuck with name brand items, but it's also worth noting that things like cables are cheaper at Amazon since you can buy generic versions (which are even cheaper at a site like Monoprice). It looks like a huge margin, but overall our particular cart at Amazon was only about 8% cheaper than Best Buy.

Of course, Best Buy offers in-store discounts based on inventory as well, so mileage in your town may vary. Weekly specials are also worth noting, since Best Buy changes those every week at specific stores. Which is to say, you might still occasionally score a sweet deal at Best Buy if you look at the right time.

If you're curious where we picked most of our items from, we got a bulk of them from you with your choices for the Hive Five. Amazon's prices on electronics tend to fluctuate a lot, so keep that in mind when you're shopping around.

Groceries Compared: Amazon vs Safeway

Is It Actually Cheaper to Order Everything from Amazon?S

Amazon's new Fresh delivery service is only available in Seattle and Los Angeles right now, but we decided to take a look at it combined with a wide variety of grocery items and compare it with the typically reasonably priced grocery chain Safeway.

For the most part, the local Safeway here in Seattle was cheaper across the board on items and our total cart was 20% cheaper at Safeway than Amazon. The big reason here is pretty simple: Amazon doesn't carry generic items. So, for anything where a generic was an option, Safeway won out. Likewise, with fresh fruits and vegetables, Amazon was a bit more expensive. For instance, bananas were more than twice the price of Safeway, but it's hard to really gauge why without seeing what the bananas actually look like. This one's a little more difficult to really quantify because size, shape, and quality vary, but overall it seemed like Safeway was cheaper for most fruits and vegetables.

The same was true for most other items we checked out. Safeway's prices seemed to be cheaper in most cases, although rarely by a significant margin. Of course, groceries fluctuate in prices a lot, AmazonFresh is only available in limited markets, and more than any other comparisons on this list grocery prices change depending on the region. Even still, for now it looks like the brick and mortar grocery store is the cheapest option. But really, this is the toughest one to compare. Unlike our other scenarios, we're forced to compare different brands, and different brands mean different prices. We tried to keep it as close as we could, but it wasn't always possible.

Books Compared: Amazon vs Barnes and Noble

Is It Actually Cheaper to Order Everything from Amazon?S

Chain bookstores are disappearing these days, but they'll be around long enough to at least run off and pick up a few choice books while you can. We decided to check the prices on some of The New York Times best sellers and some older classics.

For most of the best sellers, the prices were pretty similar between Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Amazon was cheaper in all regards, but it was typically by less than a dollar. The big difference was with older paperbacks. Amazon consistently dropped at least a dollar off the retail price, whereas Barnes and Noble just stuck with the suggested price on the book. Amazon wasn't always a huge discount, but you can typically save a dollar or two from buying Amazon.

Ebooks Compared: Amazon vs iBooks

Is It Actually Cheaper to Order Everything from Amazon?S

Amazon has had a lock on ebooks for a long while, but a number of alternate retailers have popped up over the years. The biggest is probably Apple's iBooks, and although they had some legal trouble over ebook pricing, they're still one of Amazon's biggest competitors.

iBooks was consistently more expensive than Amazon on both new releases and older books. The price differences were rarely more than a couple cents on new releases, but our Amazon total was about 10% cheaper than our iBooks total. Older books see a more significant price difference, with Amazon being a dollar or more cheaper for a bunch of classics. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit was a whole $3 cheaper at Amazon.

The lesson here is that you'll probably want to stick with Amazon for most ebooks you purchase when you have the choice. Amazon tends to be cheaper, and if nothing else they have apps on pretty much every device out there so you can actually read your books on all your devices now and in the future. iBooks, of course locks you to Apple's devices.

MP3s Compared: Amazon vs iTunes

Is It Actually Cheaper to Order Everything from Amazon?S


As far as current Billboard top singles were concerned, Amazon and iTunes were identical across the board. So, if you're just buying the hot new single of the week, it probably doesn't matter which store you go to. This is likely record companies working to lock down the $1.29 price point, and we saw similar prices in other stores.

Albums were a little different. Again, using Billboard's top albums of the week, the prices ended up splitting down the middle. Amazon was a bit cheaper on both Drake and Pusha T's newest albums, but iTunes took the cake with Panic! At the Disco and Justin Timberlake. The fact is, both stores are DRM-free, and both offer crazy discounts occasionally so it's worth shopping around and checking out both options.

Overall, we had pretty mixed results on whether Amazon's actually cheaper than other retailers. For some items, like small appliances, it's clear that shopping in a store like Walmart is usually your best choice. Likewise, if you're looking for electronics, Amazon is going to get you a better deal than a big box store like Best Buy. For groceries, we'd stick with your local store for the time being, but that could change as Amazon expands AmazonFresh to other markets. For digital goods, Amazon seems to have a lock on the cheapest ebooks, but MP3s are up in the air. Obviously Amazon has millions of different products, and some items are going to be cheaper than others. We live in a world where it seems like Amazon is probably always cheaper than retail, so it's good to keep in mind that that's simply not always the case.

Photo by FotoYakov (Shutterstock).