A class action filed in May 2026 accuses Amazon of keeping hundreds of millions of dollars in IEEPA tariff costs that consumers paid at checkout, while declining to claim the refunds that became available once those duties were struck down. If you sell on Amazon, the case matters less for the headline number than for what it says about who pays tariffs, who gets them back, and how little visibility sellers have into either.
What the lawsuit alleges
The complaint, referred to in coverage as the Markland lawsuit, centres on duties collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). After the Supreme Court struck those tariffs down, importers gained a route to recover what they had paid through U.S. Customs and Border Protection's refund process, known as CAPE. The plaintiffs' argument runs in three steps:
- Amazon, as importer of record on a large share of its first-party inventory, paid IEEPA duties on goods it later sold.
- Those duties were passed through to shoppers in the retail price, so consumers bore the cost.
- Once refunds became recoverable, Amazon either did not file, or filed and kept the proceeds, rather than returning the money to the people who had paid it.
The complaint puts the recoverable pool of IEEPA duties across all importers at roughly $166 billion. Amazon has not, at the time of writing, conceded any of the allegations, and a filed complaint is an accusation, not a finding.
Why this is a seller story, not just a consumer story
Most of the reporting frames the case as shoppers versus Amazon. Third-party sellers sit in a more awkward position, because on the marketplace side the importer of record is usually the seller, not Amazon. That changes the question from "will I get a refund from Amazon?" to "did I pay IEEPA duties myself, and have I claimed them back?"
If you imported under IEEPA, you may be owed money
Sellers who brought in inventory during the period the tariffs applied paid those duties at the border, through a customs broker or a freight forwarder. Refund eligibility follows the entry, not the platform. If your broker has not raised CAPE with you, ask them directly which entries carried IEEPA duties and whether a refund claim has been filed for each.
If you priced tariffs into your listings, your margin story changed
Many brands raised prices to absorb IEEPA costs and left them there. A refund on the duty side, with the price increase still in place, is real margin. A refund you never file for is margin you leave with Customs. Either way, the tariff line in your unit economics is now an estimate that needs revisiting.
If Amazon was your importer, watch how the case resolves
For sellers using programmes where Amazon acts as importer of record, the lawsuit's outcome decides whether any recovered duty ever flows back through the supply chain. Nothing in the complaint promises that it will.
