What Is Amazon Haul? The New $20 And Under Store, Explained

In mid-November 2024, Amazon announced a new sub-store within its mobile app: Amazon Haul. If you're a frequent Amazon shopper and especially an Amazon Prime subscriber, then you may be familiar with how the internet retail giant has additional shopping carts beyond the main one, with separate carts for grocery delivery orders from Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods. Amazon Haul adds a fourth cart to the mix, with its own unique interface, pricing, and shipping policies, built around inexpensive items — $20 and under, with many being under $10 — in dozens of categories, including fashion, home, lifestyle, and electronics. All orders have a $25 minimum for free shipping, and that shipping is on the slower side at one to two weeks, so it seems like Amazon Haul is completely divorced from Amazon Prime for now.

"Finding great products at very low prices is important to customers, and we continue to explore ways that we can work with our selling partners so they can offer products at ultra-low prices," said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon vice president of Worldwide Selling Partner Services, in the announcement. "Amazon Haul aims to help make shopping for fashion, home, lifestyle, electronics, and other products even more fun, easy, and affordable, all backed by Amazon's A-to-z product guarantee so customers can shop with confidence that the products they're purchasing are safe, authentic, and in the condition expected." With all of that in mind, let's explore how Amazon Haul looks so far and what competitors it's positioned to fight off.

The easiest way to interpret the launch of Amazon Haul is as a competitor to Temu and, to a slightly lesser extent, Shein. Temu, for the uninitiated, is a marketplace for third-party vendors to sell inexpensive, Chinese-made goods, while Shein is a more self-contained, fashion-focused version of the same basic concept (it doesn't have Temu's electronics/gadget section, for example). As of this writing, it's not clear yet if Amazon is warehousing everything itself or shipping everything from China like Temu and Shein to compete even more directly. Amazon's announcement doesn't say anything either way, but we should know before long, and we will update this space once orders are delivered and the specifics of the shipments are clear.

Curiously, unlike Temu or Shein, Amazon Haul — which is labeled as a beta product for now — does not have a search function out in front like the other parts of Amazon do. Instead, there are nine main categories to browse: Women, Men, Home, Electronics & Office, Accessories, Kitchen, Home Improvement, Beauty, and Sports. But if you select a category and then a sub-category — like Electronics & Office > Mobile Accessories — the app pulls up and auto-populates a search bar that you can use. If you're already patronizing similar sites, it seems like Amazon Haul is worth a look to see if there's anything you like, especially if it ends up being safer than Temu, but it's currently a little rough around the edges as a beta.