Where can you buy the cheapest Christmas toys?

Looking to stock up on Barbie, Lego and Hot Wheels toys to fill children's stockings with? 

We checked the prices of popular toys at the UK's biggest toy retailers and found you could end up paying 26% more, on average, at the most expensive store compared with the cheapest.

Here, Which? reveals how much you could save by shopping around and shares advice on how to save on your Christmas shopping.

Amazon cheapest for Christmas toys

We put together a bumper trolley of 49 popular toys for children from birth to school age, and calculated their average prices* at major toy retailers Amazon, Argos, Smyths Toys and The Entertainer between 18 September and 18 October 2023.

Our basket included big brands such as Barbie, Hot Wheels, Lego, Paw Patrol and VTech, and a variety of different toy types such as action figures, board games, construction toys, dolls and puzzles.

The retailer with the cheapest prices was Amazon, where the total average cost of all 49 toys was £1,042 across the month-long period we looked at. 

The priciest toy store was The Entertainer at £1,316 – that's 26% (£274) more expensive than Amazon.

• Find out more: best Lego deals.

Cheapest toy stores by age group

We split our trolley of toys by age group, and analysed the retailers’ average prices to find out whether Amazon was still the cheapest option.

The age ranges we used were babies (typically up to 18 months), preschoolers (typically one to three years old) and school-age children (typically four years old and over).

Amazon was cheapest for the toys for preschoolers and school-age kids, while Smyths Toys was cheapest for baby toys (although this category included fewer items due to challenges finding baby toys that were available across all four retailers). 

The Entertainer was priciest for all three age ranges.

Here are examples of the toys included in our list of baby toys, as well as where our snapshot research found them to be cheapest and priciest (with their average prices in brackets). Note that these are average prices for the period of our research and the toys may cost different amounts now:

These are some of the biggest price differences we found in toys for preschool children: 

And here are a few examples of price differences in toys for school-age children:

• Find out more: best Christmas gift ideas for kids - the non-parent's guide.

Supermarket toy sales 

We wanted to include supermarkets in our analysis, but they didn't stock a big enough range of branded toys. Keep an eye out for sales in supermarkets, though, as there can be decent discounts on offer.

At the time of writing, Morrisons was offering up to 57% off 50 big-brand toys, including Barbie, Disney, Hot Wheels and Lego.

Sainsbury's had a two for £15 offer on, covering items priced up to £13 individually.

Tesco had a range of offers for Clubcard holders, while Ocado also had discounts and multibuys on a range of kids' toys and stationery.

• Find out more: which supermarket is the cheapest? 

How to get the best price when shopping for toys

The high cost of living is continuing to squeeze household budgets, so if you don’t want to pay over the odds for toys this Christmas, here are some steps you can take:

• Shop around Retailers frequently change their pricing, and some use algorithms to ensure that they're always cheaper than competitors. Use price comparison sites such as Google Shopping, Kelkoo and Price Runner to see multiple retailers' prices in one place. 
• Bide your time Our analysis showed that the Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone was 121% pricier at Amazon depending on when you bought it (£11.33 vs £8.68), so if you have time, keep an eye on the price of specific items you or your loved ones are after. 
• Don't trust 'was' prices as these can be misleading, based on prices from months ago that only lasted a couple of days. To check a product's pricing history, try using CamelCamelCamel for Amazon and Price Runner for wider market coverage.
• Take advantage of extended returns periods If you're ready to get cracking with your Christmas shopping, but also want the recipient to be able to return your gift if they don't want it, check whether the retailer has an extended Christmas returns period which lasts beyond the usual 28 days.
• Use discount codes and loyalty points Many sites offer introductory discounts to new customers so sign up to the mailing list if it gets you a discount code and you can always unsubscribe afterwards. And don’t forget about making use of loyalty card points from retailers and supermarkets to help you pay for gifts.
• Earn when you spend Cashback sites sometimes offer deals at retailers and also enable you to earn money back on your spending.
• Buy second-hand As people declutter ahead of the festive period, there may be bargains to be found in your local charity shops (with some such as Fara having dedicated kids’ stores) and online via sites such as Depop, Facebook Marketplace and Vinted.

Find out more: how to get the best price when shopping online.

What the stores said

We put our findings to the retailers. 

An Argos spokesperson said: 'We are committed to offering our customers outstanding value. To declare a “cheapest” toy retailer from such limited research is staggeringly misleading to customers. Which? has looked at the equivalent of about 1 per cent of our wide range of toys and failed to account for the variety of promotions that we offer throughout the year.'

A spokesperson for The Entertainer said: 'We regret that the methodology employed each year in these tests by Which? is not designed to reflect either key customer purchasing periods nor the power and benefit of our deal based pricing structure.'

Amazon told us that it aims to offer customers ways to save throughout the year on a wide selection of toys for all ages and budgets.

• Find out more: the best shops for baby products

*The analysis is based on independent data and includes discounts but not multi-buy or any loyalty card-based prices. All prices, aside from those for individual items, have been rounded to the nearest pound.