Japan's Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) on November 11, 2026 approved a commitment plan from Amazon Japan G.K. that resolves an investigation into how Amazon.co.jp decides which seller's offer appears next to the "Add to Cart" button. Since September 2019, according to the regulator, an algorithm has withheld that position from any seller whose price was higher than the lowest price for the same product on rival shopping sites - and when no seller cleared that bar, no offer at all appeared on the product page, not even the cheapest one in Amazon's own store.

The JFTC suspected the conduct breached Article 19 of the Antimonopoly Act, under paragraph 12 of its designation of unfair trade practices, which covers trading on restrictive terms. Under the approved plan, Amazon Japan must display the lowest-priced available offer on the product page whenever no seller qualifies for the top position, keep that display running for five years, and hand oversight of the whole package to a third party approved by the JFTC. No fine was imposed. The approval, the JFTC stated, is not a finding that Amazon Japan broke the law.

The documents describe a mechanism that turned prices on other websites into a condition for selling on Amazon. They also show how narrow the fix is. The quotations from the JFTC's documents below are PPC Land translations from the Japanese.

In Short

Japan's competition regulator accepted Amazon Japan's offer to change how product pages on Amazon.co.jp work, over concerns that sellers were effectively pushed to match the lowest price found on rival shopping sites or lose their place next to the buy button. The case matters to every merchant selling on Amazon in Japan and to the rival marketplaces that, according to the JFTC, could not win shoppers with discounts, points or sales events under the rule. When no seller meets that rival-price benchmark, Amazon must now show the cheapest offer on the page for five years, under a monitor who reports to the regulator, though none of the measures changes the benchmark that decides who gets the top position.

One page, one offer

Amazon Japan operates the store at Amazon.co.jp and signs contracts for its "Amazon Selling Service" with outside merchants, collecting various fees in return. The JFTC's starting point is the store's size. Among online shopping stores in Japan, Amazon's has the largest gross merchandise value, according to the regulator, and holds "a considerable share," with high recognition and strong ability to draw customers - which is why "selling products in the Amazon store is important for sellers in running their business."

The architecture of the store concentrates that importance on a single spot. Each product has one product detail page, carrying the name, images and description, no matter how many sellers list it. On that page, one seller's offer - price, delivery terms, ship-from and sold-by information - appears together with the "Add to Cart" and "Buy Now" buttons. The position is labelled "おすすめ出品" in Japanese - the Featured Offer, in Amazon's English terminology. Other sellers' offers do not appear on the product detail page. A shopper who wants to see them has to open a separate page listing every offer, which the JFTC calls the "all offers display."

Most purchases skip that step. According to the JFTC, "the majority of products purchased in the Amazon store are bought from the offer listed as the Featured Offer, without the all offers display being viewed." Some sellers told the regulator that if their offer is not featured, it is not shown on the product page, consumers do not notice it, and their sales fall sharply.

The competitive price

To qualify for the Featured Offer, a seller's sale price had to be at or below what Amazon Japan calls the "competitive price." Both terms carry precise definitions in the JFTC's documents.

The sale price is the product price, plus any shipping fee, minus the value of any points awarded on the purchase. In a market where shopping points are a common promotional tool, the deduction matters.

The competitive price is the lowest sale price for the identical product across "a considerable number of online shopping stores" that Amazon Japan considers substitutes for its store from consumers' point of view, measured by price and product range. That group, according to the JFTC, includes stores with large gross merchandise value in Japan. The JFTC's case overview describes it more bluntly as "the lowest price on other EC sites."

Clearing the bar only bought a place in the running. Among the sellers that qualified, Amazon chose the Featured Offer by weighing delivery terms and other factors.

The rule had a harder edge. If no seller qualified, no offer information appeared on the product detail page at all - "including the offer with the lowest sale price in the Amazon store," the JFTC wrote.

What the JFTC says Amazon Japan did

According to the regulator, Amazon Japan introduced an algorithm-based system in September 2019 to decide whether each offer was eligible for the Featured Offer. Three practices tied to that system, the JFTC said, led sellers "to set the sale price of products in the Amazon store at or below the 'competitive price.'"

  • Amazon Japan denied Featured Offer eligibility to any product whose sale price exceeded the competitive price.
  • It told those sellers why - through notices in Seller Central, its management tool for listing products and setting prices, and by email, among other channels - stating that the offer was not featured because its price was higher than the competitive price.
  • It informed sellers generally that, to become eligible, they needed to set prices at or below the competitive price.

The JFTC's case overview illustrates the page sellers faced: a product page without an offer, a notice reading "the price is higher than the typical price" and a button to "see all offers." The regulator notes that its images are illustrations and differ from Amazon's actual display.

Three harms, in the JFTC's reading

The legal test for trading on restrictive terms in Japan asks whether an influential company attaches conditions that bind a trading partner's business activities, in a way that risks excluding new entrants or existing competitors or reducing their trading opportunities. The JFTC laid out its concerns in three strands.

Sellers' freedom to price

The first concerns the sellers themselves. If they do not price at or below the competitive price, their offers disappear from the product page and their Amazon sales "decrease substantially," an economic disadvantage that leaves them "with no choice" but to comply, according to the JFTC. Pricing, the regulator argued, belongs to the merchant: on an online mall, sellers should set prices "of their own will," taking into account their costs, profit and competitors' prices.

Profit is a further concern. Because the competitive price is "the lowest" among competing stores, "there may be cases in which sellers cannot earn a profit by selling the product at that price," according to the JFTC.

The no-offer scenario drew the sharpest language. Even when a seller set the lowest price inside Amazon's store, its offer did not appear on the product page if nobody met the competitive price, so that "from the consumer's point of view, it is as if the product were not being sold." That, the JFTC wrote, "substantially deprives sellers that do not sell at or below the 'competitive price' of the sales opportunity itself."

Rival stores lose their tools

The second strand concerns rival shopping sites, which the JFTC does not name. Because the system pulled Amazon prices down to, or below, prices elsewhere, rivals' promotional spending lost its effect. Lowering sales commissions, funding the points awarded to shoppers or running sales events "would not succeed," according to the JFTC, leaving competitors "deprived of means of competition" in the contest for consumers.

The case overview adds a detail missing from the main release. The mechanism, it states, "has the effect of lowering prices in the Amazon store to or below prices on other EC sites without any burden on Amazon Japan." In that reading, rivals that paid for discounts would see Amazon prices follow them down, with sellers rather than Amazon carrying the cost.

Suppliers turned against rivals

The third strand runs through the supply chain. Some Amazon sellers also supply the same products to other online stores. When the price at one of those stores showed up in Amazon's system as the competitive price, those sellers - "expecting the 'competitive price' to rise" - sometimes asked the other store to price the product at or above their own Amazon price, or stopped supplying it altogether, according to the JFTC.

The result, the regulator said, is that rival stores could no longer sell the product below Amazon's price, or could not carry it at all, putting them at a disadvantage on both price and range.

The JFTC concluded that the conduct could exclude competitors or reduce their trading opportunities, and that it used "unfair means of competition from the standpoint of competition on the merits, centred on price, quality and service."

Nine measures, five years

Amazon Japan's commitment plan contains nine measures, as summarised by the JFTC:

  1. Where no offer is at or below the competitive price and no Featured Offer therefore appears, Amazon Japan must show on the product detail page, "in a manner that consumers can easily see," the price, delivery terms, ship-from and sold-by information for the purchasable offer with the lowest price including any shipping fee, together with "an entry point indicating that consumers can proceed to purchase the product."
  2. Help pages for sellers and for consumers must explain that this information appears and that shoppers can buy through that entry point.
  3. The display in measure 1 must run for five years from the date it starts operating.
  4. Amazon Japan's business decision-making body must formally adopt measures 1 through 3.
  5. Sellers must be notified of the measures, and relevant employees informed.
  6. Amazon Japan must draw up a code of conduct on Antimonopoly Act compliance covering the prices sellers set in its store, train relevant staff periodically and have its legal staff run periodic audits.
  7. Monitoring of measures 1 through 6 must be entrusted to a third party, limited to one the JFTC has approved.
  8. That third party must report to the JFTC on the implementation of measures 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6.
  9. During the five-year period, the third party must report to the JFTC every year on the display and on the training and audits.

The JFTC accepted the plan on two grounds set by law. The measures were "sufficient" to eliminate the suspected conduct, it said, because they cover removing the problem, guidance for sellers and consumers, five years of the display, a formal corporate decision, and notification of sellers and staff. They were also certain to be carried out, according to the JFTC, because the plan builds a compliance system, hands monitoring and reporting to an approved third party, and sets a deadline for each measure.

The release does not disclose those deadlines. Nor does it give the date the new display will start, which also sets the start of the five-year clock, or name the monitor.

What the plan leaves in place

The JFTC's case overview summarises the change in one sentence: even if a sale price is not at or below the competitive price, "the offer information for the lowest-priced product within the Amazon store will be shown on the product detail page." Under the heading of expected effects, it says that "sellers can set prices at their own discretion," that rival sites "will be able to roll out price cuts, point rewards, sales and similar measures more actively," and that consumers will enjoy "better services, including on price, through fair competition between EC sites."

The measures, as the JFTC lists them, address the case in which no seller meets the competitive price. None of the nine refers to the eligibility test itself, to products where at least one seller does meet the benchmark, or to the Seller Central notices that tell sellers their price is too high. Nothing in the plan, as described, changes the position of a seller priced above the competitive price on a product where another seller qualifies: under the system the JFTC describes, that seller does not hold the Featured Offer, and its offer does not appear on the product page.

The new display also differs from the Featured Offer in one detail. The commitment describes "an entry point" showing that shoppers can proceed to buy, not the "Add to Cart" and "Buy Now" buttons the Featured Offer carries. The documents do not say what form that entry point will take.

A procedure that avoids a finding

The commitment procedure in Japan's Antimonopoly Act lets the regulator and a company resolve a suspected violation without a formal ruling. The documents set out the sequence. Under Article 48-2, the JFTC notifies a company of the suspected conduct and the provisions it may have breached. The company can then, under Article 48-3, draw up its own plan to eliminate the conduct and apply for approval within 60 days of the notification. The JFTC approves the plan if the measures are sufficient and expected to be carried out reliably.

In this case the timetable was compressed. The JFTC sent its notification on November 4, 2026, and approved the plan on November 11 - seven days later. The release does not state when Amazon Japan filed its application.

Approval has a defined legal effect. Article 48-4 of the Act disapplies the provisions on cease-and-desist orders and surcharges for the conduct and the measures covered by an approved plan. The JFTC describes the approval as an administrative disposition. It is also conditional. If the plan is not implemented as approved, or the approval turns out to rest on false or wrongful facts, Article 48-5 requires the JFTC to revoke it, and the regulator says it would then resume the investigation from where it stood before the notification.

The JFTC lists the Fifth Investigation Division of its Investigation Bureau as the contact for the case. Amazon Japan, registered at Azabudai in Tokyo's Minato ward, lists Amazon APAC Holdings, Inc. as its representative member.

Japan's recent restrictive-trading cases

The JFTC published the Amazon decision alongside two other recent cases under the same paragraph of its unfair trade practices designation, a choice that places the marketplace case in a short line of actions against large global companies.

On April 15, 2025, the JFTC issued a cease-and-desist order against Google LLC. According to the JFTC's summary, from July 2020 at the latest Google had prevented rival general search services from being implemented on certain Android smartphones by requiring manufacturers that licensed the Google Play store to preinstall Google Search and other Google apps in specified screen positions, and by paying manufacturers and carriers revenue shares on condition that they did not preinstall competing search apps. That case was Japan's first action against Google. Those contracts covered about 80% of Android smartphones sold in Japan as of December 2023, and Google was required to appoint an independent third party to monitor compliance for five years. Google paid no financial penalty.

On July 22, 2025, the JFTC approved a commitment plan from Visa Worldwide Pte. Limited. The case concerned interchange fees, the charges acquirers pay card issuers on Visa transactions. Visa had applied a preferential rate when sales data was submitted within a set number of days of either the purchase date or the authorisation date. In February 2018 it told card companies that, for certain merchant categories, the preferential rate would apply only when measured from the authorisation date, as identified by a transaction identifier generated on Visa's own network, and it has applied that rule since November 2021.

The Amazon plan follows the Google template in two respects: an outside monitor and a five-year horizon. Unlike Google, Amazon Japan reached its outcome through the commitment route, with no cease-and-desist order.

The broader Japanese framework for digital platforms has shifted over the same period. The Mobile Software Competition Act, under which Apple and Google were designated in March 2025, took effect in December 2025, and Apple opened iOS in Japan to alternative app marketplaces and payment processing on December 17, 2025. That law targets mobile platforms. The Amazon case ran under the general Antimonopoly Act.

Germany took a harder line

Japan is not the first regulator to examine Amazon's use of outside prices to police sellers. In June 2025, Germany's Bundeskartellamt issued a preliminary assessment finding that Amazon's price control mechanisms likely violated German and EU competition law. Its description of the problem closely resembles the JFTC's: dynamic price caps that change without transparent criteria, sellers unable to cover their costs, and products where the Buy Box is not displayed at all because no seller complies with Amazon's caps.

The German outcome was different in kind. On February 5, 2026, the Bundeskartellamt banned Amazon from controlling third-party seller prices on its marketplace and ordered disgorgement of €58.8 million. The order targeted three systems, including exclusion from the Buy Box for "excessively high prices" and disqualification for "uncompetitive prices." Amazon had one month to appeal to Germany's Federal Court of Justice.

Set side by side, the two cases treat a similar mechanism very differently. The German authority prohibited the price control systems and ordered disgorgement. Japan's regulator accepted a display change limited to products where no seller qualifies, with no payment and no finding of a violation.

Elsewhere, Amazon's pricing conduct remains in litigation. In the United Kingdom, the Competition Appeal Tribunal in January 2025 selected Prof Andreas Stephan's claim on behalf of more than 200,000 UK-based merchants, which alleges self-preferencing of Amazon's own retail offers in the Buy Box between 2015 and 2024. In California, the Attorney General in April 2026 released a largely unredacted filing alleging that Amazon coordinated retail price increases with vendors and competing retailers, with trial set for January 19, 2027. The California filing describes upward pressure on prices at rival retailers, a related dynamic to the one the JFTC identified in Japan, where sellers asked other stores to raise prices or stopped supplying them.

For merchants, the Featured Offer is where the sale happens. The JFTC's statement that most purchases come from that position, without shoppers opening the all-offers page, is a regulator's own account of how much a listing depends on it.

The position also governs more than organic sales. Under the price control mechanisms German enforcers examined, listings priced outside Amazon's range could lose advertising eligibility as well as visibility. Neither the JFTC's documents nor the commitment plan mention advertising, and they do not say whether the new lowest-price display will affect which offers can be promoted.

Amazon has also been reworking the Featured Offer. In July 2026, it removed seller performance as a standalone eligibility gate, moving metrics such as chargeback rates into the ranking formula, with the change rolling out across all Amazon stores by the end of 2026. Amazon's statement on that change listed "competitive pricing, delivery speed, and performance" as selection criteria and did not say whether competitive pricing enforcement was affected. The Japanese commitments now sit on top of that system in one market.

The JFTC's definitions also carry weight for sellers. The sale price deducts the value of points, and the competitive price draws on stores Amazon Japan itself selects as substitutes, including those with large gross merchandise value. The release does not name those stores or say how many there are; "a considerable number" is as far as the JFTC goes.

US regulators are pursuing Amazon on a separate front. On August 31, 2026, the FTC and 22 states sued Amazon over about $20 billion in alleged hidden ad surcharges, a case about advertising auctions rather than marketplace pricing. Japan's case closes one front with commitments rather than penalties. Whether five years of a lowest-price display changes how sellers on Amazon.co.jp set prices - when none of the measures touches the rival-price benchmark for the buy button - is a question the monitor's annual reports to the JFTC will address first. The release does not say whether those reports will be published.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Japan's Fair Trade Commission and Amazon Japan G.K., operator of Amazon.co.jp, along with the third-party sellers who list products there and the rival online shopping stores the JFTC says were disadvantaged.

What: The JFTC approved a nine-measure commitment plan addressing an algorithm that, since September 2019, made Featured Offer eligibility depend on a seller's price being at or below the lowest price for the same product on rival sites. Amazon Japan must show the lowest-priced offer on product pages when no seller qualifies, keep that display for five years, adopt compliance training and audits, and appoint a JFTC-approved third-party monitor that reports annually. There is no fine and no finding of a violation.

When: The JFTC notified Amazon Japan of the commitment procedure on November 4, 2026 and approved the plan on November 11, 2026. The start date of the new display has not been disclosed.

Where: Amazon.co.jp in Japan, under Article 19 of Japan's Antimonopoly Act and paragraph 12 of the JFTC's designation of unfair trade practices on trading on restrictive terms.

Why: The JFTC was concerned that the system restricted sellers' freedom to set prices, sometimes below cost, made rival stores' commission cuts, points and sales ineffective, and led some sellers to push rival stores to raise prices or to stop supplying them. The commitment route lets the case close without a cease-and-desist order or surcharge, provided Amazon Japan carries out the plan.