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New Court Ruling: Amazon To Be Liable For Defective Products On Its Platform

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An appeal court in California has ruled that Amazon could be liable for defective products sold on its marketplace. The ruling suggests that if you buy a defective third-party product on Amazon, you can hold the company responsible.

 

The California Fourth District Court of Appeals made the ruling. In effect, it reversed a 2019 trial court judgment, reinstating a woman’s claim of suffering third-degree burns when a defective laptop battery she bought from a third-party seller on Amazon caught fire.

 

Amazon has claimed for years that it is only an intermediary between buyers and its third-party sellers, in what the company refers to as the “Amazon Marketplace”. In a third-party listing, small lines of texts indicate that Amazon itself isn’t the actual seller.

 

This disclaimer has protected Amazon from liability for Marketplace products and dissociated it from third-party sellers. Now, based on this new ruling, the company faces several other lawsuits over defective products in other courts.

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The woman at the center of the suit is Angela Bolger who says she bought a replacement laptop battery on Amazon. The vendor was a third-party seller, E-Life, which is a different company name for Lenoge Technology Ltd. It shipped the battery to her in Amazon-branded packaging.

 

Months later, Bolger claims that the battery exploded. A lower court in 2019 ruled that Amazon was not covered under product liability laws. Bolger appealed the ruling, getting a new one in her favour.

 

In the ruling, the appeal court notes Amazon is central to the laptop battery’s sale in Bolger’s case. “Whatever term we use to describe Amazon’s role, be it ‘retailer,’ ‘distributor,’ or merely ‘facilitator’. It was pivotal in bringing the product here to the consumer,” the court wrote in the ruling. The court also added that Amazon should be held responsible if a product on its website is defective.

 

Amazon says it plans to appeal the decision because it believes the ruling was contrary to California laws. “The court’s decision was wrongly decided and is contrary to well-established law in California and around the country that service providers are not liable for third party products they do not make or sell,” a spokesperson for the company said.

 

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