American Online Retailers represents domestic e-commerce retailers harmed by unfair trade practices perpetrated by foreign sellers. We work with legislators, public interest groups, and other coalitions to advocate for legislative, administrative, and policy changes to address this widespread issue.

In recent years, the rapid growth of foreign sellers on e-commerce platforms like Amazon has created significant challenges for American retailers. Foreign sellers exploit trade loopholes to avoid tariffs, income taxes, and regulatory scrutiny. This influx of foreign sellers is harming the American economy, leading to job losses and shrinking opportunities for U.S. workers. This hurts the American retailers, consumers, and the efficacy of our national trade policy.

To add insult to injury, a significant portion of foreign sellers systematically engage in unethical and unfair trade practices, including fake reviews, bribery of Amazon employees, keyword manipulation, review-bombing, and customs evasion. These practices face steep penalties in the United States and can lead to bans or even prosecution. But foreign sellers face little to no scrutiny from their government and Amazon has largely turned a blind eye to their misconduct.

All of these factors have severely hurt American Online Retailers. American retailers, who once made up a vast majority of sellers on e-commerce platforms, now account for less than 48% of top sellers on Amazon, with Chinese sellers now making up the majority. Foreign sellers have targeted American retailers, using unfair trade practices, to illegitimately take down listings and suspend accounts, costing American consumers an extraordinary amount of time and money to recover.

The rise of foreign sellers and their use of unfair trade practices has not only affected the competitive landscape but has also led to broader economic decline. American companies are going bankrupt, leading to job losses and increased hardship in local communities. We must change our trade policies to ensure that American sellers are protected from unfair trade practices and we must work with e-commerce platforms to ensure a fair and even competitive playing field for retailers.

We are advocating for a number of policy changes the Federal government could make to level the playing field between foreign sellers and American retailers, including:

• Strengthen trade policies to ensure that foreign sellers must pay tariffs and taxes on their sales in the US, abide by the same regulations that American online retailers follow, and do not exploit loopholes
• Implement universal 1099 reporting, including foreign entities, to ensure that companies with significant economic presence in the United States do not have an unfair competitive advantage over domestic producers and sellers
• Close the de minimis loophole that allows foreign sellers to avoid paying duties on orders up to $800 while US retailers selling the same goods must pay

We are also advocating for e-commerce platforms to take a number of steps, either independently or through government regulation, to mitigate the unfair trade practices of foreign sellers, including:

• Increasing the length of the payout cycle for foreign sellers with no domestic presence to ensure that aggrieved parties can recover ill-gotten funds
• Establishing a system, similar to the Amazon Patent Evaluation Express Program, to disincentivize frivolous intellectual property claims
• Requiring sellers to have a registered agent or a verified address for service of process in the United States and verifying the seller’s identity and contact information
• Providing greater protections to verified domestic retailers in disputed cases with foreign sellers from countries with greater instances of fraud and limited legal recourse
• Improving existing and implementing new technical measures to mitigate new seller account creation by previously banned users, screen for paid and fake reviews, and detect other fraudulent and malicious activity

We are conducting an extensive education campaign with political leaders and policy makers to fully explain the issue, make it a part of the mainstream conversation, and ensure that we are working towards a solution. We are also putting pressure on e-commerce platforms to work with American retailers to strengthen safeguards to mitigate the unfair trade practices of foreign sellers. If you are an American online retailer, please join our efforts.