Temu vs AliExpress vs Amazon: which is cheapest?

The honest answer: it depends on the product — and on the shipping and fees, not the sticker price.

Ask ten shoppers which of Temu, AliExpress or Amazon is cheapest and you'll get ten confident answers — all of them right some of the time. The same product genuinely does cost different amounts on each platform, but which one wins changes from item to item. There is no permanent champion, and any guide that names one is guessing. What decides the winner is rarely the price you see on the product page. It's the real total: price + shipping + fees.

Why the sticker price misleads

Each store plays a different pricing game:

• Temu often shows a very low headline price, but shipping can depend on order value, delivery speed, and minimum-spend thresholds. A cheap item can stop being cheap once delivery is added — or become free-shipping only if you pad the basket.
• AliExpress prices vary seller by seller for the identical item, and shipping ranges from free-but-slow to a meaningful chunk of the item's price for faster delivery. Two listings that look the same can land at very different totals.
• Amazon tends to show higher headline prices, but delivery is frequently included or cheap, and the total at checkout is usually close to the price on the page. That makes Amazon the most predictable — not always the cheapest, but rarely the most surprising.

So a product can be cheapest on Temu by sticker price, cheapest on AliExpress once a seller offers free shipping, and cheapest on Amazon once Temu's delivery fee and AliExpress's paid shipping are added in. All three outcomes happen every day, on ordinary products.

What actually decides the winner

Three things, in order: the shipping cost to your address, any fees added at checkout, and only then the shelf price. Delivery time matters too — the cheapest total sometimes means the slowest boat — but cost comparisons should always start from the full landed total, not the first number on the screen.

The catch is doing this by hand. Checking one product properly means opening three apps (or ten), searching each, noting shipping for each, and doing the arithmetic yourself — for every single purchase. Most people check one or two stores, at sticker price, and hope.

Check one product across all of them in a single search

That's the job BargainBadger was built for. One search compares the same product across 20 stores — Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Temu, AliExpress, SHEIN, DHgate, Alibaba, Vinted, TikTok Shop, Target, Wayfair, ASOS, Zalando, Currys, Notino, Nike, ABOUT YOU, Otto and StockX — and ranks every result by the real total: price + shipping + fees. The automatic Verdict then names the Best Buy with its score and reasons, so you don't have to take anyone's word for which store is "usually" cheapest. You see which one is cheapest for this product, today, delivered to you.

Found something you want but not at today's price? Add it to your watchlist, set "Your budget", and BargainBadger alerts you the moment any store's total hits it.

Next time someone tells you one of these stores is "always cheapest," you'll know the real answer: run the search and compare the totals. It takes one search instead of ten tabs.