Australia's competition regulator will not open a specific investigation into the online sellers named in a consumer advocacy complaint, instead throwing its weight behind federal legislative reform it says is better suited to closing gaps that have let unsafe products reach households through online marketplaces.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission published its formal response on 1 September 2026 to a designated complaint filed by consumer organisation CHOICE, according to the regulator's media release. The complaint, lodged on 3 June 2026, argued that the growth of online marketplaces and online stores has outpaced Australia's product safety framework, allowing unsafe, banned, prohibited and dangerous goods to reach consumers at scale.

According to the ACCC, it agrees with the substance of that concern. The regulator's response states that the existing Australian Consumer Law has limitations when it comes to online marketplaces, limitations that are leading to consumer harm, including harm to children. Yet rather than launching new enforcement action against the specific sellers and listings that CHOICE identified, the ACCC has pointed toward a law reform process already underway inside the Federal Government's Treasury department.

What the ACCC decided, and what it did not

The distinction at the centre of this response matters for how marketplace sellers and the platforms that host them should read it. CHOICE's complaint provided a range of examples of products that allegedly breached safety standards, or were allegedly banned, prohibited or unsafe, and that were being sold on online marketplaces at the time of filing. The ACCC contacted the online marketplaces named in the complaint to bring the matter to their attention. It stopped there.

"The ACCC does not propose to commence an investigation in relation to the specific examples raised," the regulator stated in its response. "We consider reforms are key to addressing the issues raised in the complaint."

That is a narrower outcome than CHOICE may have sought when it filed the complaint in June. The organisation had asked the regulator to treat unsafe listings as a live enforcement problem; the ACCC's answer reframes the same evidence as proof that the underlying legal architecture, not any single seller's conduct, needs to change. The regulator was careful to note this is not a blanket retreat from enforcement. "We will also continue to consider and investigate matters, including as part of the ACCC's compliance and enforcement priority focused on unsafe consumer goods in digital markets," the response states, an acknowledgment that individual cases can still surface through the commission's existing priorities even where this particular complaint will not generate one.

ACCC Commissioner Luke Woodward framed the decision as a matter of where responsibility should sit under current law. "Australian consumers should be able to trust that products they purchase are safe, including when they buy goods online," Woodward said, according to the ACCC. "We currently face challenges where sellers are based overseas or the online marketplace is not the direct supplier, making it difficult to prevent unsafe products sold through online marketplaces from reaching consumers."

That sentence identifies the structural weakness the ACCC says it cannot fully address through existing enforcement tools alone: a marketplace operator that hosts a listing but never takes possession of the goods, and an overseas seller beyond the practical reach of Australian process, together leave a gap between where harm occurs and where legal accountability under current settings can attach. Woodward continued: "We believe that many of the issues raised in the designated complaint are best addressed through regulatory reforms, including through clear obligations on online marketplaces." He added that the ACCC also supports "exploring options for new general safety protections relating to the safety of all consumer goods to further strengthen the product safety framework."

The reform Treasury will lead

According to the ACCC, the Federal Government has announced that Treasury will lead work to strengthen the product safety framework. Three specific strands were named in the regulator's release: improving mandatory injury reporting, strengthening penalties, and ensuring online marketplaces are subject to mandatory obligations. None of the three has yet been translated into draft legislation, based on the material published alongside the ACCC's response, and no timeline for that process was given.

The push toward statutory obligations for marketplaces did not originate with this complaint. In July 2026, Consumer Affairs ministers identified a holistic review of the product safety framework and laws, including general safety protections, as a priority area for reform, according to the ACCC. The commission described this review as capable of supporting earlier intervention and giving regulators more effective tools to hold market participants accountable. Woodward reiterated that position in the response to CHOICE: "We strongly support the review and will continue to engage with online marketplaces while we support and participate in the law reform process underway by Treasury."

The regulator was explicit that agreement on the need for reform does not mean abandoning the tools it already has. "While we agree there are gaps in current product safety laws, we will continue to use our full suite of compliance and enforcement tools to act against suppliers of unsafe goods, including Federal Court enforcement action where appropriate," Woodward said.

A gap the ACCC says the law does not close

One structural point raised in the complaint went unresolved by anything short of new legislation. The ACCC's response notes that Australia does not have a general law that prevents the sale of unsafe products. Product safety regulation instead operates through specific bans, mandatory standards for particular categories, and disclosure and recall obligations, rather than through a single overarching duty that would apply automatically to any unsafe good regardless of category. That absence is one of the reasons general safety protections appear in the reform strands the ACCC says it supports.

The enforcement record behind the policy language

The ACCC's response to CHOICE did not arrive in a vacuum. The regulator's release recounts a sequence of enforcement and regulatory actions against unsafe consumer products, several of them targeting online marketplaces directly, that stretches across the first three quarters of 2026.

Button batteries anchor much of that record. According to the ACCC, three children have died in button battery incidents in Australia, and button batteries pose a significant risk to young children if swallowed or inserted. In August 2026, the Federal Court dismissed an appeal by Australian retailer Fewstone Pty Ltd, trading as City Beach, upholding an earlier $14 million penalty for selling non-compliant button battery products in proceedings the ACCC had brought. Those products, the regulator noted, were available both in-store and online.

The online marketplace dimension of button battery enforcement escalated further in May 2026. The ACCC sued Amazon Australia over children's backpack battery safety labels, commencing Federal Court proceedings against Amazon Commercial Services Pty Ltd on 29 May 2026 under case number NSD905/2026 in the New South Wales Registry. The case alleges that "Unicorn Toddler" backpacks in Amazon's possession or control, offered for sale on its online marketplace, failed to comply with mandatory button battery warning requirements. It marked the first time the ACCC had taken an online marketplace before the Federal Court over alleged non-compliance with mandatory product safety standards.

Days later, the ACCC widened its attention from a single platform to four at once. On 2 June 2026, the regulator issued takedown requests to Amazon, eBay, Kogan and Fruugo over magnetic toys containing small high-powered magnets, a product category banned in Australia since 2012 because of the risk the magnets pose if swallowed. According to the ACCC's own account, the four marketplaces committed to additional measures intended to prevent sellers relisting the same or similar products after the takedown requests were issued.

Also in May 2026, the Australian Government announced a permanent ban on baby bottle self-feeding devices, a measure that followed a Safety Warning Notice issued after an ACCC recommendation to the responsible minister and a subsequent ACCC investigation into the safety of these devices. The regulator's response to CHOICE notes that many of the banned products were available to consumers online. The ban, which took effect on 26 May 2026, made it illegal to manufacture, supply, possess or advertise devices that let an infant feed from a bottle without another person holding it or providing active supervision.

Two entities recur across these actions. Amazon AU appears both as a defendant in Federal Court litigation and, according to the ACCC, as one of three signatories to the Australian Product Safety Pledge, a voluntary scheme under which participating companies commit to a set of product safety-related actions and report annually on performance. The regulator introduced the voluntary Product Safety Pledge for online marketplaces in 2020. Signatories now include Amazon Australia, eBay Australia, AliExpress, Temu, Gumtree and Fruugo, all of whom have committed to increased monitoring for unsafe products and to regularly checking for and removing unsafe product listings. According to the ACCC, it strengthened the pledge earlier this year and intends to keep working with online marketplaces to monitor commitments and increase the number of signatories.

That juxtaposition, a company operating under both a voluntary pledge and compulsory Federal Court proceedings over the same general subject matter, illustrates the limits the ACCC itself has identified in self-regulatory frameworks once specific incidents surface.

The mechanism behind the response: designated complaints

CHOICE's complaint used a formal legal channel that only three bodies in Australia are currently entitled to invoke. The designated complaints framework, part of the Competition and Consumer Act, came into effect on 1 May 2024. Under the law, bodies designated by the responsible minister can each make one designated complaint within a twelve-month period. CHOICE is currently one of these designated complainant bodies. Designated complaints must meet defined criteria, and the ACCC is legally required to assess and publicly respond within 90 days of receipt.

CHOICE filed its complaint on 3 June 2026. Counting 90 days forward places the statutory deadline at approximately 1 September 2026, the date on which the ACCC published its response, indicating the regulator answered within the window the law allows rather than ahead of or after it. This appears to be among the more consequential uses of the designated complaints mechanism since its introduction, given the scale of the underlying subject matter and the reform commitments the response has drawn from Treasury.

Why this matters for marketing and retail media

For publishers, retailers and marketing teams operating in or advertising into the Australian market, the ACCC's response signals that the compliance environment around online marketplaces is entering a period of legislative change rather than settling into a stable enforcement pattern built solely on case-by-case litigation. Businesses that sell through third-party marketplaces, or that advertise marketplace listings, face a regulator publicly stating that current law does not adequately assign responsibility when a seller is overseas or when the marketplace is not the direct supplier. Any statutory change that imposes mandatory obligations directly on marketplaces, rather than relying on suppliers or the general provisions of the Australian Consumer Law, would alter where legal and reputational risk sits across a transaction chain that advertising and retail media budgets increasingly run through.

PPC Land's coverage of the ACCC's parallel work in 2026 gives some sense of how quickly that regulatory posture toward digital marketplaces has moved. The commission's February 2026 enforcement priorities already named unsafe consumer goods in digital markets as a specific focus area, work that drew on findings from the ACCC's five-year Digital Platform Services Inquiry. That inquiry's own survey data, cited by the ACCC in that priorities announcement, found that a majority of Australians surveyed had encountered potentially unfair practices on online marketplaces within a twelve-month period. The CHOICE response and the Treasury-led reform it endorses sit downstream of that same body of evidence, extending the regulator's stated concerns from unfair trading practices into physical product safety.

Advertisers running campaigns for marketplace sellers, and retail media platforms built on top of marketplace inventory, operate in the same commercial space this reform targets. A marketplace facing new mandatory injury reporting duties, strengthened penalties or direct legal obligations for listings hosted on its platform would need to reconcile those duties with the speed and scale that programmatic and marketplace advertising systems are built to deliver. Whether draft legislation ultimately reaches Parliament, and on what timeline, remains open. The ACCC's response commits only to continued engagement with Treasury's process, not to a specific date by which new obligations will take legal effect.

Summary

Who: The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), responding to a designated complaint from consumer organisation CHOICE. Amazon Australia, eBay, Kogan, Fruugo, AliExpress and Temu are named across the broader enforcement record the ACCC cited.

What: The ACCC published its formal response to CHOICE's complaint about unsafe products on online marketplaces. It agreed that gaps exist in the current product safety framework but declined to investigate the specific sellers and listings CHOICE named, instead backing Treasury-led reform covering mandatory injury reporting, strengthened penalties and mandatory obligations for marketplaces.

When: CHOICE filed its complaint on 3 June 2026. The ACCC published its response on 1 September 2026, within the 90-day statutory window required under the designated complaints framework.

Where: Australia, under the Australian Consumer Law and the Competition and Consumer Act's designated complaints provisions, which took effect on 1 May 2024.

Why: The ACCC says existing consumer law does not adequately hold online marketplaces accountable when sellers are based overseas or when the marketplace itself is not the direct supplier of a product, a gap the regulator says has contributed to unsafe goods reaching consumers, including children, through digital retail channels.

Timeline

  • 2012: Australia's permanent ban on certain small high-powered magnets in toys, games, puzzles, jewellery and construction kits comes into force under the Australian Consumer Law.
  • 2020: The ACCC creates the voluntary Product Safety Pledge for online marketplaces.
  • August 2024: The ACCC issues a Safety Warning Notice regarding baby bottle self-feeding devices.
  • 1 May 2024: The designated complaints framework in the Competition and Consumer Act comes into effect.
  • 19 February 2026: ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb sets out 2026-27 compliance and enforcement priorities, naming unsafe products in digital markets as a core focus.
  • 26 May 2026: The Australian Government enacts a permanent ban on baby bottle self-feeding devices.
  • 29 May 2026: The ACCC commences Federal Court proceedings against Amazon Commercial Services Pty Ltdover alleged button battery warning failures on children's backpacks.
  • 2 June 2026: The ACCC issues takedown requests to Amazon, eBay, Kogan and Fruugo over banned high-powered magnet toys.
  • 3 June 2026: CHOICE submits its designated complaint to the ACCC regarding unsafe products on online marketplaces.
  • July 2026: Consumer Affairs ministers identify a holistic review of the product safety framework as a priority reform area.
  • August 2026: The Federal Court dismisses Fewstone Pty Ltd's (City Beach) appeal, upholding a $14 million penalty for non-compliant button battery products.
  • 1 September 2026: The ACCC publishes its response to CHOICE's designated complaint, backing Treasury-led reform over new investigation of the specific examples raised.