Depends on the goods and the product. If I care about quality at all (and apparently, I care a lot about quality...), I avoid Amazon.

I've bought counterfeit books from Amazon where the text bleeds due to poor inks. As well as low-quality paper from "international edition" textbooks instead of the high-quality paper I'm used to. Worse yet: a counterfeit copy likely is "pirated goods", where the Publisher / author don't get the money. (The main point of buying books is to support the author, more so than perhaps the text itself). It was fine when I was a student and needed to save money, but my personal library has no use for bleeding books printed on poor quality paper. I only have two bookshelves (for books) in my house, I don't have enough room to keep all the low-quality books.

Branded goods are often slightly miscategorized or mislabled on Amazon. I'm talking 2300mAh Energizer AA vs 2400 mAh Energizer AA. In these cases, I was trying to match up battery packs for electronics, where its very important to get matching NiMHs, but the Amazon Marketplace merged the two battery types ("close enough" isn't good enough for me). I now buy my electronics products from Adafruit / Digikey, two stores which understand the importance of documentation and precise SKUs. Commodity AA NiMHs I buy from Home Depot, which have been properly labeled in my experience.

Finally, Walmart prices are actually pretty fine, and sometimes beat Amazon's. A good example this past month was when I bought a Cast-iron skillet.

* https://www.walmart.com/ip/Lodge-Logic-Seasoned-Cast-Iron-12...

* https://www.amazon.com/Lodge-Skillet-Pre-Seasoned-Skillet-Si...

I made sure to shop around for the lowest price, and lo-and-behold, Walmart was cheaper.

> You can have a lot of garbage come from Aliexpress and still come out ahead

Do you trust the preseasoning of a Cast Iron skillet to a cheap no-name company? I guess if you're planning to strip the cast iron skillet of its seasoning and you're going to oil it up with Flax Seed oil yourself... its hard to get the "Cast Iron" part wrong. Its the pre-seasoning process that you're buying in this case.

Lodge's pre-seasoning isn't the best, but its type and quality is well listed and documented: Soybean Oil (http://www.lodgemfg.com/use-and-care/what-is-seasoning) . That's good enough for most people, and its probably too much of a bother for most people to find higher-quality oils and season the pans themselves.

Buying the brand-name has benefits. Final bonus points: Lodge Cast-iron is still made 100% in America, for those who care about that little detail. But the brand name trust is a benefit.

There's lots of people who review and discuss Lodge's choice of pre-seasoning, so its a well known constant. Buying no-name brands on Alibaba is a risk: you pretty much have to do quality-control yourself.

Perhaps I'm obsessing too much over the quality of a $20 pan. But frankly, if I can't trust the pan's quality in my kitchen, its complete garbage to me. I have enough cheap pans in my kitchen, I'm spending more time throwing out broken kitchen appliances than buying new stuff.

I mean, sure, I could risk it with maybe a $5 or $10 pan from Alibaba instead. But why should I even risk it? Lodge has high enough quality, is highly reviewed in cast-iron enthusiast online discussion, and is widely available.