Amazon and eBay are two of the largest marketplaces in the world and there's no doubt that both contain some great bargains for everyday items on a price per unit basis. Here at How Much Per Unit we focus on eBay for a few reasons. One is accessibility to the data required to perform the comparisons of price per unit for thousands of listings. So how do we know that Amazon isn't offering better prices than those available on eBay?
We have conducted manual searches of Amazon to see if we can beat some of the best prices available on eBay and for each product page we publish we will conduct similar studies and publish the results. Where we find ways to locate comparable bargains on Amazon using their standard search features we will share our findings.
Lets investigate a pretty common purchase, toothpaste. At the time of writing the best price per unit for toothpaste that we could find on eBay was for 12 125ml tubes of Macleans Freshmint toothpaste at a price of £16.80. That's a total of 1.5 litres at £11.20 per litre.
A search on Amazon for the same product description yielded fifty results. Amazon generally list their price per unit on toothpaste per hundred millilitres. So to match our eBay price we're looking for £1.12 per 100ml. The best we could find was a similar listing for 12 tubes of the same product for £17.70. Amazon's own software incorrectly interprets this listing as being £14.16 per 100ml when in fact it is £1.18 per 100ml or 6p per 100ml more than eBay.
We can see that in this case eBay is a little cheaper than Amazon and that may be down to different costs of selling between the two marketplaces. While this single example obviously is not a definitive conclusion regarding price per unit differences between these two major online marketplaces it is an indication that eBay is highly competitive.
We will continue to study the cost per unit differences between Amazon and eBay for each of the everyday products we feature on the site to ensure you can buy with confidence that you're getting some of the best prices available on the internet for essentials sold by weight, length, volume and unit.