Should You Also Consider AmazonBasics?

If you shop on Amazon, it’s hard to ignore AmazonBasics. Since launching in 2009, AmazonBasics products now regularly top the best-seller lists in many categories, such as lightning cables, laptop sleeves, and hangers. So should you respond to the company’s repeated nudges to also consider the option from AmazonBasics?

The easy answer? Just read our reviews. We test AmazonBasics offerings whenever they’re relevant and even recommend its stuff as a top pick or alternate in our guides to paper shredders, HDMI cables, school backpacks, and 12 other reviews (as of this writing). But they don’t always fare so well in our testing (Amazon’s rechargeable AA batteries were the worst performers by a wide margin). But the company is releasing new things in new categories at a faster pace than we can keep track of them.

According to data analyzed by e-commerce software company Skubana, there are currently more than 800 AmazonBasics-branded items for sale on the site, with over 20 new ones launched each month. But it’s hard to discern what, exactly, all of them have in common. Many are indeed “basics,” the type of commoditized, undifferentiated, everyday items you don’t “buy for life,” and that you don’t want to waste much time researching or shopping for: cables, screen protectors, dog-waste bags. But others, especially many of the newer items, don’t feel like “basics” at all: yoga mats, bocce ball sets, a “natural stone fire pit with copper accents.”

What unites all these things has less to do with what AmazonBasics sells, than with how Amazon decides to sell it. Chad Rubin, Skubana’s CEO, explained in an interview that it’s an open secret that Amazon targets things—regardless of category—marketed by other brands that are selling exceptionally well on the site, and creates its own, often nearly identical versions, launching them as new AmazonBasics products. (We asked Amazon to comment on Skubana’s analysis, but the company didn’t reply to us.)

Judging by the number of positive reviews AmazonBasics items have gotten—a large number have several thousand user reviews, each with four-plus star averages—AmazonBasics is doing quite well. Only a very small handful have fewer than four-star averages, and none have fewer than 3.5 stars. This is not an accident. “Amazon has a very stringent and dedicated practice toward quality control and they do benchmarking,” notes Rubin. Skubana’s research suggests that underperforming products (anything approaching three stars or lower) are discontinued as soon as they start struggling so they don’t drag down the average. In other words, AmazonBasics probably makes a bad product from time to time, but it’s good at detecting and removing them before you learn about them. The result is a house brand with an exceptionally random selection of offerings that also appears to be exceptionally well-regarded by users.

However, based on our past testing experiences, we wouldn’t commit to anything AmazonBasics sells that costs much more than $20 without doing some research first. For example, its Bluetooth speakers’ most distinguishing characteristic is their low price, which made the BTV2 good enough to contend for a budget pick in our Bluetooth speaker review. However, spending just a bit more gets you something a lot more capable. But the cheaper stuff can look enticing, especially with those great user-review averages backing them up. After all, how different can one cleaning cloth be from another? To get a better sense of what you can expect from these everyday necessities, we took a closer look at a handful of AmazonBasics products that we hadn’t previously tested, to see how they performed relative to other popular brands in their categories: pencils, microfiber cleaning cloths, disposable utensils and dog-waste bags.

Pencils: AmazonBasics’ #2 (HB) woodcase pencil, General’s Cedar Pointe (our pick in our Best School Supplies guide), and the Dixon Ticonderoga (our budget pick in that guide).

General’s Cedar Pointe’s unfinished cedar case gave it a nicer grip and finish than the others. And the AmazonBasics’ 1 millimeter shorter eraser and the fact that they weren’t sharpened out of the box were both minor annoyances. Otherwise, the AmazonBasics pencils were largely equivalent to the Dixon and General in writing performance. Our picks were a bit nicer to use overall, but if the price is better on the AmazonBasics (or you’re buying in bulk), you’ll likely be happy with them.

Microfiber Cleaning Cloths: AmazonBasics, BinTek, and The Rag Company microfiber cleaning cloths (all current bestsellers on Amazon).

The AmazonBasics cloths were lighter than the BinTek and Rag Company cloths, both of which had higher polyamide content (a sign of better-quality microfiber, according to this microfiber wholesaler). The AmazonBasics cloths were less absorbent, but not by a staggering margin: They held five and a half times their weight in water; the Rag Company cloths held 5.7 times their weight, and the BinTek cloths held six times their weight. All cloths performed equally well at wiping fingerprints from a mirror and polishing it with glass cleaner. At under 50¢ per square foot, the AmazonBasics cloths are largely equivalent in functionality, if not construction, to the other popular brands, which are more expensive.

Disposable Utensils: AmazonBasics’s 360-Piece Clear Plastic Cutlery Set, Costco’s Kirkland Signature Clear Cutlery (our pick in our Great Gear for Parties guide) and Dixie’s Ultrastrong Plastic Cutlery Combo.

We saw no obvious differences between brands in durability when stress-testing the forks by jabbing them against a hard surface. The Kirkland knife performed the worst at slicing onions, taking significantly more effort to cut through, and the AmazonBasics and Dixie knives performed similarly to each other. The AmazonBasics utensils are a great buy, costing about the same as Kirkland’s discount utensils but with better knives.

Dog-Waste Bags: AmazonBasics Dog Waste Bags with Dispenser and Leash Clip, Pets N Bags Dog Waste Bags, and Pogi’s Poop Bags with Easy-Tie Handles.

The AmazonBasics bags were among the best we tested at containing odor, and most important from our perspective, they’re completely opaque. Plus, the bags separate from the roll easily, and they’re very reasonably priced. The thick plastic on the AmazonBasics bags can make them a little tricky to open, especially in cold or wet weather, but on those rare occasions that they do rip, the failure is so complete that it’s nearly impossible to not realize it. The one significant drawback of the AmazonBasics bags is that they’re non-biodegradable plastic, so if that matters to you, we liked the Pets N Bags and and Pogi bags, too.

Wrapping it up

Overall, our experiences echoed what we’d found in assessing AmazonBasics products for our full reviews: If the price is right, they’re a safe bet if you’re not expecting to be wowed. This works well for things that are more basic, like cables or pencils. But the more complex and expensive a product is, the less competitive AmazonBasics becomes because it models its offerings on previously available designs instead of launching entirely unique products. We try to keep tabs on these as they appear, and we’ll test them when we find out about new ones, but if we miss any, let us know at notes@thewirecutter.com and we’ll get to them as soon as we can.