It’s Official: Amazon Is Responsible for Defective Products Sold on Its Platform

Federal regulators found that Amazon is a “distributor” and must submit a plan to recall hundreds of thousands of faulty products.

Amazon has a “legal responsibility” to issue recall notices for hundreds of thousands of defective products — including faulty carbon monoxide monitors, hair dryers that lack electrocution protection, and children’s sleepwear that “fails to meet flammability requirements, ”according to a U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission ruling handed down this week.

The ruling found that Amazon, which made $575 billion in revenue last year, was the “distributor” of more than 400,000 products sold by third-party sellers that were either defective or failed to meet consumer safety standards. 

The Tuesday decision by the CPSC to label Amazon a distributor of products runs counter to Amazon’s longstanding argument that it’s simply a “logistics provider” or a marketplace, and thus has no legal responsibility to customers who purchase products from other sellers on its platform. More than 60 percent of sales on Amazon’s webstore are from independent sellers, according to the company.

The CPSC, which is comprised of three Democrats and two Republicans, voted unanimously on the decision. To comply with the ruling, Amazon will now be required to submit plans to notify customers who purchased those defective products and to incentivize customers to return or destroy the products.

The charge that Amazon isn’t sufficiently monitoring what’s sold on its platform isn’t new. A 2019 investigation by the Wall Street Journal found more than 4,000 items listed for sale on Amazon’s platform that either had deceptive labeling or had been banned by U.S. regulators. The shipping for nearly half of those products originated at Amazon warehouses, according to the Journal. 

The company has also been sued several times over products sold on its website, including earlier this year by dozens of parents who said their children bought a toxic amount of sodium nitrate on Amazon and later used it to end their lives. 

The CPSC first sued Amazon in 2021 to force the recall of the faulty products. Then-acting CPSC Chair Robert Adler said at the time the lawsuit was a “huge step forward,” but “a huge step across a vast desert—we must grapple with how to deal with these massive third-party platforms more efficiently, and how best to protect the American consumers who rely on them.”

The CPSC ruling is just one of the regulatory issues for the e-commerce giant. The Federal Trade Commission and more than a dozen attorneys general filed an antitrust lawsuit last year and accused the company of running an illegal monopoly, and alleged the company punishes third-party sellers who offer their product cheaper anywhere else; the trial will begin in 2026. Amazon also argued in a legal filing earlier this year that the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional, in a case where the company was accused of union busting at the warehouse in Staten Island where workers won a high-profile union election in 2022. 

A spokesperson told CBS News on Tuesday that Amazon plans to appeal the recall ruling in court, and that the company already has “proactive measures in place to prevent unsafe products, and we continuously monitor the listings in our store. If we discover an unsafe product available for sale, we address the issue immediately, and refine our processes." 

As part of its legal defense to the CPSC, however, Amazon argued that being forced to post agency-approved recall notices on its social media accounts is a First Amendment violation. That claim was dismissed.