Cheap Online Mattresses
What to Know Before You Buy
In recent years, cheap mattresses have flooded the internet. Most are imports from low-cost manufacturing countries like China, though some are manufactured in the United States as well. They have no-name ('generic') brands and simple designs, but tend to make big marketing claims and often have seemingly great customer reviews. Given how confusing and difficult it can be to purchase a mattress, these products can be tempting options for many consumers. But before you consider going down this road, you should at least know the truth about what you'd be getting.
The Truth about Online Mattress Reviews
Much has been written about the veracity of Amazon reviews in general, so we won't belabor the point that Amazon has struggled mightily to keep companies from flooding their platform with fake reviews that artificially inflate star ratings and review counts. This problem can be particularly glaring with products imported from overseas companies.
But separate from this general point, mattress reviews on Amazon have much bigger issues.
Self-Selection Bias
First, there is the self-selection problem. Anyone who purchases a generic online mattress has already identified themselves as someone who has minimal requirements from their mattress. This is evidenced by their willingness to roll the dice without the ability to test and compare different products, and without any expert guidance or evaluations to go on.
In addition, because they spent the lowest possible amount, they will naturally have the lowest possible expectations. Together, these factors make them extremely easy to please — they are, in effect, the easiest graders on the internet.
Premature Timing Bias
Second, there is the problem of when these reviews are collected. Most reviews are submitted in response to a review request from Amazon, which arrives shortly after you receive the product. At this point in time, none of the most important aspects of a mattress can be assessed.
Does it provide good back support? No way to know – back pain resulting from improper spinal alignment can take weeks or months to develop (and unfortunately, even longer to fix).
Does it keep you cool? Won't be clear till the first heat wave of summer rolls around.
Will it hold up? A mattress should maintain its comfort and support for years. So by definition, it will take years to know whether it really did.
Key Take-Away
Net, at the point in time that Amazon asks for your review, all you really know is that it came, you opened it up, and it was indeed a mattress. And for most people who buy an ultra-cheap mattress, that's good enough for 5 stars. This is fine as a review of the experience of receiving and unboxing it (which, not for nothing, is the same for virtually any online mattress). But the critical point is that these reviews say nothing about the actual quality or performance of the mattress.
The Truth about Ultra Cheap Online Mattress Claims
The mattress industry has long suffered from a lack of standards and third-party validation for marketing claims. This is a problem that hurts consumers, who need to know which products really meet their needs, and in turn hurts manufacturers, who aren't able to get full credit when their products really do deliver against their claims. These are some of the key reasons that GoodBed created the mattress industry's first ever scientific testing program in collaboration with Dow.
The ultra cheap boxed mattresses that have flooded the market in recent years are the extreme embodiment of this problem. Typically, the flowery product descriptions provided by the manufacturers make all the same claims that more expensive products do — supportive, pressure-relieving, cooling, long-lasting, etc. Most industry insiders know that these claims are completely false. But without any expert guidance, or even a salesperson to assist them in their shopping, a consumer browsing these products online has no way to know this.
Amazon Mattresses Fail Consumer Safety Testing
In 2025, some of the glaring problems with these products started to come to light. In mid-2025, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued recalls on a number of popular Amazon mattresses for failing to meet federal safety standards, advising consumers to cease use of these products immediately.
More recently, Leggett & Platt, a public company that has served the mattress category since 1883, performed its own tests of some of the most popular mattresses on Amazon. According to their published findings (shown below), "each of the tested mattress models had high Amazon search rankings and were almost all sold on Amazon by third-party sellers. Each model underwent the same full-scale prototype testing used to establish a new mattress’s design compliance with the CPSC’s open-flame standard, known as the '1633' test." Of the 8 mattresses that Leggett & Platt tested, 7 of them failed 1633 flammability testing.
Key Take-Away
In our view, the findings of the flammability testing done by the CPSC and by Leggett & Platt are extremely alarming to say the least, and for multiple reasons. First and most obviously, these safety standards are there for a reason, and clearly these products fail to meet those standards.
Even more importantly though, what else does this failure say about these products? Passing basic flammability tests is literally the ONLY legal requirement to selling a mattress in the United States. If these mattresses were deceitful or inadequate in doing the one thing that they were legally required to do, how much faith can be placed in anything else they claim to do? Can you believe any statements they make about the use of fiberglass in their products? Can you really trust their voluntary adherence to programs like CertiPUR-US®? And of course, can you put any stock at all in the much more flimsy, but no less grandiose, claims they make about back support, pressure relief, durability, and the like? Surely not.
Equally disturbing is the fact that Amazon has done so little to police these obvious legal violations. Thanks to the sales of ultra-cheap imported mattresses like these, Amazon is most likely now the largest unit seller of mattresses in the entire country. One would think this would come with an enormous amount of responsibility. And yet, one of the products recalled by the CPSC was Amazon's own house brand of mattresses – Amazon Basics. On top of that, Leggett & Platt's testing demonstrates that Amazon has completely failed to ensure that the mattresses they sell are even legal, let alone safe to be in a consumer's home. And of course, it was Amazon's utter failure to provide consumers with expert guidance about its mattresses that led to the proliferation of low-quality mattresses like these in the first place.
By and large, the mattresses sold on Amazon are generic, no-name brands. As such, these brands can easily be abandoned when information like this comes out. But in that case, they will just as quickly be replaced with new generic mattress brands that are similarly low quality and likely just as dangerous – and perhaps even are made by the very same manufacturers.
Overall, the information brought to light by these findings raises two key questions that every mattress shopper should consider. First, is it worth the risk to buy an ultra cheap imported mattress? And second, can you trust Amazon as a seller of mattresses? From GoodBed's perspective, until we see much better from these companies, our answer to both of these questions is a firm "No."
