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For the USA I've found that Walmart, Target, Home Depot, and Best Buy together satisfy much of my "need that free shipping on cheaply made shit" desire.

You do still have to watch out for marketplace items on some of them. And if it really IS direct-from-China why not go to eBay or Alibaba?

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Quite often when ordering cheap Chinese junk that I can wait a month for, I do use eBay and AliExpress. I'm generally pretty happy. I save quite a bit of money, and the experience is no worse than Amazon 99% of the time.

AliExpress does manage to have a search feature that is massively worse than Amazon's, if you can believe that possible.

I have more trust for eBay then Amazon at this point.

However, I think the last purchase I made through Amazon was super specific (particular model of washing machine agitator motor) and unlikely to be glump-binned. So perhaps that's the approach.

Yeah Amazon is good for popular well known items and long tail stuff.

The things in the middle are the problem.

It's easy for me to drive by the big stores, so I usually have them deliver to the store which guarantees no delivery fees and is often faster. YMMV

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