For most products, at least in Europe you can get the same cheap junk of Amazon listings from eBay at 20-40% lower prices, and usually (slightly) higher quality one from brick and mortar stores at the Amazon price.
I avoid Amazon in principle since many years (unless I _really_ need a product there), but that has never been hard, considering that most smaller stores always offered me more convenient prices, less hassle in searching, and the relief of not giving money to such a controversial giant.
As someone who dislikes eBay and prefer to deal with companies, rather then individuals, the UKs preference for eBay is interesting. Working for an eCommerce site we noticed that customers would prefer to deal with a lady in Scotland over us, for certain types of products. She just posted our product on eBay, added a few £ to the price, ordered them from us, typed in her customers address in the shipping fields.
Worked out for everyone, given that her customers would rather order on eBay and pay a little extra, compared to dealing with us. We got the price we wanted, plus we didn't have to deal with customer service.
It's weird, one would expect eBay to be more of a wild west than Amazon marketplace, but in my experience the eBay sellers are fast and mostly trustworthy.
That's because on Ebay, there's seller feedback, and it's actually useful. People leave negative feedback if there's a problem, and the feedback is specific to that seller. If a seller has been on there for 20 years with a perfect 100% feedback score, you know they're trustworthy, and if they've been on there for 1 week with 0 feedback, you know they're not.
Amazon comingles listings from Amazon themselves, FBA, and independent sellers shipping things themselves, so there's not really a good way of telling if you'll have a good experience or not.
It's the same thing in Canada. It's easy to identify the mass produced Chinese products. You search for an item on Amazon and find 30 different "companies" with random names selling the identical product with different logos. The prices will range from $10-30. I know if I go to eBay I can buy the same product for $2 with free shipping from China. I only have to decide if I want the product delivered tomorrow through Amazon or in 1-2 months from China.
I ordered something from Amazon a few weeks ago, and didn't check the shipping time. I turned out that the thing was sent directly from China and took 2 weeks. The tracking that Amazon provides did not even work properly. There is really almost no reason anymore not to order the stuff on Aliexpress for 20% lower prices.
I avoid Amazon in principle since many years (unless I _really_ need a product there), but that has never been hard, considering that most smaller stores always offered me more convenient prices, less hassle in searching, and the relief of not giving money to such a controversial giant.