Amazon Tariff MDL Created: JPML Sends Shoppers' Refund Suits to Seattle and Judge John Chun

The Amazon tariff MDL now exists: on 2 October 2026 the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) centralized the consumer class actions accusing Amazon of keeping tariff refunds that its shoppers paid for, creating In re: Amazon Tariff Litigation, MDL No. 3197, in the Western District of Washington before Judge John H. Chun. The order puts every federal Amazon tariff-refund case on one Seattle docket, so the threshold questions that decide whether consumers can recover any part of the roughly $600 million Amazon has received from the government will be answered once, by one judge, rather than separately in Florida, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Washington.

The ruling is the first centralization out of the consumer wave that followed the Supreme Court's 20 February 2026 decision striking down the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs. It is also narrower than it looks. The Panel built a single-defendant docket around Amazon, not the cross-industry proceeding a separate group of plaintiffs is still asking for, and it said nothing about whether a shopper who paid a tariff-inflated price has any claim at all. What follows sets out what the order does, who it covers, what it leaves open, and what practitioners on both sides should expect from the first months in Seattle.

What is the Amazon tariff MDL?

The Amazon tariff MDL is a federal Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) that gathers, for pretrial purposes only, the proposed class actions alleging that Amazon raised retail prices to pass IEEPA tariff costs on to shoppers and now refuses to share the refunds the government is paying back. Its formal caption is In re: Amazon Tariff Litigation, MDL No. 3197.

The petition was filed on 1 August 2026 by plaintiffs led by Mari Cartagenova, one of the named plaintiffs in the first Seattle complaint. The JPML's hearing-session filing lists the actions then pending outside Washington, including Lasseter v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 8:26-cv-02019 (M.D. Fla.), Emerson v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 2:26-cv-12614, and Sangha v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 1:26-cv-01777, with the proposed transferee action being the consolidated In re Amazon Tariff Litigation, No. 2:26-cv-01670, already pending in Seattle. The Panel heard argument on 24 September 2026 at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in Chicago and ruled eight days later.

Reports differ slightly on the inventory. Bloomberg Law describes six suits centralized by the order; Law360's 6 October report describes transferor courts in Florida, Michigan, New York and Ohio. Amazon's own 24 August filing referred to suits in New Jersey, New York, Florida, Michigan and Ohio. The difference matters less than it seems: any later-filed federal action raising the same allegations against Amazon can be sent to Seattle as a tag-along under the Panel's rules without a fresh hearing.

An MDL is not a class action and not a merger of the cases. Each action keeps its own identity; the transferee judge handles discovery, motions and other pretrial matters, and any case not resolved in the MDL is, in principle, remanded to its home court for trial. In practice, consumer MDLs of this kind usually proceed on a consolidated complaint, and their fate turns on Rule 12 and class certification rulings made by the transferee judge.

Which judge has the Amazon tariff MDL, and why Seattle?

The transfer order sends the actions on its Schedule A to the Western District of Washington "with the consent of that court" and assigns them to Judge John H. Chun for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings, according to the order text docketed in the transferred actions. Judge Chun is not new to Amazon. He presides over the Federal Trade Commission's monopolization suit against the company, FTC v. Amazon.com, Inc., No. 2:23-cv-01495, and in 2023 he appointed interim co-lead counsel in a consolidated consumer antitrust class action against Amazon in the same court.

Seattle was close to inevitable. Amazon is headquartered there; its consumer Conditions of Use designated state or federal courts in King County, Washington, as the forum for customer disputes during the years it did not require arbitration; and the two earliest complaints, Markland v. Amazon.com, Inc. and Rosen v. Amazon.com, Inc., were filed in the Western District of Washington on 15 May 2026 and consolidated there on 29 June 2026. Reports on that June consolidation identified Judge Tana Lin as the presiding judge. The MDL order names Judge Chun, so the Seattle-filed actions will either be reassigned to him or coordinated with the MDL docket; that housekeeping should appear in the first case management order.

Most importantly, the forum was not contested by the defendant. In its 24 August 2026 response, Amazon told the Panel that it "vigorously disputes the plaintiffs' claims" but agreed that, if the cases are to proceed, they should proceed together in the Western District of Washington. When the plaintiffs' movant and the sole defendant propose the same transferee district, the Panel rarely looks elsewhere.

Why did the JPML centralize the Amazon tariff refund lawsuits?

The Panel found that the actions share common questions of fact arising from the same alleged conduct by a single company and that centralization serves the convenience of the parties and witnesses and the just and efficient conduct of the litigation, the two statutory tests under 28 U.S.C. § 1407. In the Panel's words, as reported by Bloomberg Law, centralization "will eliminate duplicative discovery; prevent inconsistent pretrial rulings, particularly with respect to class certification; and conserve the resources of the parties, their counsel, and the judiciary."

The phrase "particularly with respect to class certification" is the useful one. The Panel uses some version of the duplicative-discovery formula in nearly every grant, but it singles out a specific risk only when it sees one. Here, every complaint pleads a nationwide or multistate class of Amazon buyers over essentially the same period, and several plead overlapping subclasses. Five district judges ruling separately on Rule 23 Predominance, on whether a tariff pass-through can be proved with common evidence, and on whether a buyer of a domestically sourced product belongs in the class at all, could easily have reached different answers. A single transferee judge removes that risk.

The single-defendant structure also kept the order easy. The JPML has recently been skeptical of dockets that combine competing manufacturers or unrelated defendants: it refused an industry-wide spinal cord stimulator MDL in June 2026, and on the same day as the Amazon order it created separate Abbott and Nevro dockets before two different judges. A one-company, one-pricing-system docket fits the Panel's comfort zone.

What do the consumers allege, and who qualifies for the Amazon tariff refund class action?

The consumers allege that Amazon, acting as importer of record for a large share of the goods it sells directly, paid IEEPA tariffs at the border, raised retail prices to recoup them, and is now collecting refunds of those same duties without returning the difference to the customers who bore the cost. The proposed classes cover people who bought tariffed goods from Amazon's own online store during the period the IEEPA duties were collected, pleaded in several complaints as 4 February 2025 through 20 February 2026.

No class has been certified, so no one "qualifies" yet in a legal sense. Under the complaints as filed, a buyer who purchased a product sold by Amazon itself, rather than a third-party seller, during that window would fall within the proposed class definitions. The Rittenhouse complaint in the Eastern District of New York, No. 2:26-cv-03392, divides the class into an imported-product subclass and a U.S.-sourced-product subclass, the second built on the allegation that Amazon raised prices on domestic goods too.

Action	Court and number	Named plaintiff's purchase	Principal claims
Markland v. Amazon.com, Inc. / Rosen (consolidated)	W.D. Wash., No. 2:26-cv-01670 (lead)	China-made vacuum cleaner and Vietnam-made audio adapter (Markland)	Washington Consumer Protection Act (treble damages), unjust enrichment, restitution of a proportionate share of refunds
Rittenhouse v. Amazon.com, Inc.	E.D.N.Y., No. 2:26-cv-03392	Garden tools	N.Y. General Business Law §§ 349 and 350, unjust enrichment, money had and received
Lasseter v. Amazon.com, Inc.	M.D. Fla., No. 8:26-cv-02019	Dartboard	Consumer-protection and restitution theories; pleads "tens of millions" of class members
Emerson v. Amazon.com, Inc.	No. 2:26-cv-12614 (Michigan)	Not publicly detailed	Same pass-through theory
Sangha v. Amazon.com, Inc.	N.D. Ohio, No. 1:26-cv-01777	Not publicly detailed	Same pass-through theory

Two pleading features recur. First, the plaintiffs lean on the fact that consumers have no right to a refund from U.S. Customs and Border Protection themselves: the refund right belongs to the importer of record, so the only route to the money runs through the retailer. Second, the Markland complaint alleges that Amazon initially declined to seek refunds to "curry favor" with the President, an allegation that matters less now that Amazon has in fact recovered money, but that frames the unjust-enrichment theory.

Amazon's defenses, previewed in its filings and in its public statements, go to causation and damages: that suppliers rather than Amazon imported most goods, that Amazon stocked inventory ahead of the tariffs, and that it absorbed much of the cost rather than raising prices. Those are fact-intensive defenses, which is exactly why they bear on whether a class can be certified.

Is there an Amazon tariff refund settlement, and how do customers get money back?

There is no settlement, no settlement class and no claim form in the Amazon tariff MDL. What exists is a voluntary program Amazon described on its 30 July 2026 earnings call, when Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said the company had received about $600 million in tariff refunds, which he called "the significant majority" of what it expects to recover. Amazon said it would contact and automatically refund customers in the limited set of cases where it can trace a specific import charge it passed on to a specific order, and use the remainder to lower prices.

That program does not end the litigation. A voluntary refund to some customers may reduce damages for those customers and may be argued as a partial defense, but whether it moots any claim is a question for Judge Chun. Plaintiffs will say the "traceable charge" standard is far narrower than the price increases they allege, and that the remainder, spent on future price cuts, benefits different customers from those who paid.

The size of the pool the litigation is chasing depends on the government's refund pipeline. According to Bloomberg Law, of roughly $166 billion in IEEPA duties paid, more than $100 billion had already been processed. U.S. Customs and Border Protection's refund portal, known as CAPE, opened its third phase on 6 October 2026, covering finally liquidated entries; eligibility for that phase is limited to importers that are plaintiffs in pending IEEPA cases at the Court of International Trade, a restriction that is itself being litigated. For a restitution or unjust-enrichment theory, the timing and amount of the importer's refund is the measuring stick, so discovery will reach Amazon's CAPE filings early.

Does Amazon's new arbitration clause apply to the tariff refund claims?

Probably not to the claims in the MDL, and that is the most consequential thing the order leaves untouched. Amazon removed binding arbitration from its consumer Conditions of Use on 3 May 2021, after roughly 75,000 individual demands over Echo devices, one of the first large-scale tests of Mass Arbitration. Every purchase in the pleaded class period, February 2025 to February 2026, was made under terms that sent disputes to court in King County, Washington.

On 14 August 2026 Amazon reinstated an Arbitration Clause with a Class Action Waiver, escalating JAMS Batching triggered by a Mass Filing Threshold of 25 coordinated demands, and a first-of-its-kind requirement to disclose Third-Party Litigation Funding. That clause arrived three months after the first tariff complaints and six months after the class period closed. Applying a later-adopted clause to an already-pending claim by an already-named plaintiff is a hard argument, and courts have treated post-litigation rollouts with suspicion. Amazon's filings in the centralization fight did not rely on arbitration, and no Motion to Compel Arbitration has been reported in these cases.

The clause still matters at the margins. If a court later asks whether absent class members accepted the new terms by continuing to shop after 14 August 2026, the answer could affect class definitions and notice. And any new tariff-related pricing claim arising after that date belongs, on Amazon's terms, in arbitration, not in Judge Chun's courtroom.

Does the Amazon MDL cover tariff lawsuits against Target, Walmart, Costco and other retailers?

No. MDL No. 3197 covers only actions against Amazon. A separate petition, In re: Retailer Tariff Litigation, MDL No. 3202, filed on 14 August 2026, asks the Panel to combine roughly 25 consumer tariff suits pending in 11 federal districts against Amazon, Target, Walmart, Nike, Costco, Shein, Temu and others in the Northern District of Illinois. That petition was not on the Panel's 24 September hearing calendar and remains pending, according to Bloomberg Law's report on the Amazon order.

The defendants have fought it hard. On 10 September 2026 thirteen companies, including Amazon, Costco, Walmart and three Shein entities, filed a joint opposition arguing that each retailer set its own prices under its own supply arrangements, so there is no common pricing decision to centralize. Costco filed separately the next day.

The Amazon order sharpens that argument rather than resolving it. The Panel has now shown it will centralize tariff-refund cases around one company's pricing conduct; the question for MDL No. 3202 is whether it will do the same across competitors. Its recent practice points toward company-specific dockets, which would leave Target, Walmart and the others litigating in their home districts or seeking their own single-defendant MDLs. Any Amazon cases swept into the 3202 petition are now more naturally treated as tag-alongs to Seattle.

Amazon tariff MDL timeline

Date	Event
4 February 2025	Start of the class period pleaded in several Amazon complaints
20 February 2026	Supreme Court strikes down the IEEPA tariffs in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump
15 May 2026	Markland and Rosen filed in the Western District of Washington
29 June 2026	Seattle court consolidates the two Washington actions
14 July 2026	Lasseter filed in the Middle District of Florida
30 July 2026	Amazon reports about $600 million in tariff refunds received
1 August 2026	Motion to centralize filed as MDL No. 3197
14 August 2026	Amazon reinstates consumer arbitration; MDL No. 3202 retailer petition filed
24 August 2026	Amazon supports the Western District of Washington while disputing the merits
10 September 2026	Thirteen retailers jointly oppose MDL No. 3202
24 September 2026	JPML hears argument in Chicago
2 October 2026	JPML centralizes MDL No. 3197 before Judge John H. Chun
6 October 2026	CBP opens CAPE Phase 3; Law360 reports the transfer

What happens next in the Amazon tariff MDL?

The next steps follow a familiar sequence. Transferor clerks send the files to Seattle; Judge Chun issues an initial practice and procedure order; and the first contested event is usually appointment of interim class counsel under Rule 23(g), which in a consumer MDL with firms from several states can itself draw competing applications. Leadership then files a consolidated amended complaint, and Amazon responds with a motion to dismiss.

That motion is where the litigation is likely to be decided. Expect Amazon to argue that consumers lack any legally cognizable interest in an importer's refund, that the voluntary-payment doctrine and the absence of a misrepresentation defeat the consumer-protection counts, that unjust enrichment fails where consumers received the goods they paid for, and that the alleged price effect is speculative. Plaintiffs will respond that Amazon told customers price increases reflected tariffs, that the refund is a windfall measured precisely by what customers paid, and that equitable restitution does not require a contractual relationship to the government.

If claims survive, class certification is the next and probably final test. The Panel's own order flagged it as the reason for centralization. Proving on a classwide basis that a particular product's price rose because of a particular duty, across millions of SKUs and a year of dynamic pricing, is a demanding exercise in economic modeling, and a Daubert Challenge to the plaintiffs' pass-through expert is likely.

What it means for plaintiffs' counsel, defendants and funders

Plaintiffs' counsel. The order converts a scattered race to file into a leadership contest. Firms with the earliest-filed complaints and the most developed pass-through damages models are best placed; late filers will be tag-alongs with little say. Because the claims are small per buyer, the case only works as a class action; a Negative-Value Claim cannot be litigated individually, and the class period predates Amazon's arbitration clause, so the court route remains open.

Retail defendants. The Amazon grant is a template the Panel may or may not extend. Retailers named in the 3202 petition now have a stronger argument that, if centralization is warranted at all, it should be company-specific. Companies with arbitration clauses in force during 2025 are in a different posture altogether, and the decisive early motion for them is a motion to compel, not a centralization fight.

Litigation funders. The economics hinge on a refund pool that is finite, visible and partly already returned. Amazon's $600 million is the outer marker for its own restitution exposure on the pleaded theory, before trebling under the Washington statute. Funders weighing Third-Party Litigation Funding in this wave should also note Amazon's new clause requires disclosure of funding agreements in arbitration, a signal of where the defense bar is heading.

Importers and their customs counsel. Discovery in Seattle will reach CAPE submissions, refund timing and pricing communications. Records showing whether tariff costs were absorbed or passed on now carry litigation value beyond customs compliance.

FAQ

What is the Amazon tariff MDL?

It is In re: Amazon Tariff Litigation, MDL No. 3197, a federal multidistrict proceeding created on 2 October 2026 that consolidates for pretrial purposes the proposed class actions alleging Amazon passed IEEPA tariff costs on to shoppers and kept the refunds.

Where is the Amazon tariff MDL and which judge has it?

It is in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, assigned to Judge John H. Chun, who also presides over the FTC's antitrust suit against Amazon.

Why did the JPML centralize the Amazon tariff refund lawsuits?

The Panel said centralization would eliminate duplicative discovery, prevent inconsistent pretrial rulings, particularly on class certification, and conserve the resources of the parties, counsel and the courts. Amazon agreed that Seattle was the right forum.

Who qualifies for the Amazon tariff refund class action?

No class has been certified. The complaints propose classes of people who bought tariffed goods sold by Amazon itself between about 4 February 2025 and 20 February 2026, and some add a subclass for U.S.-sourced products.

Is there an Amazon tariff refund settlement?

No. Amazon has said it will automatically refund customers where it can trace a specific import charge to an order, but there is no court-approved settlement, settlement class or claim form.

Does the Amazon MDL include Walmart, Target or Costco?

No. Those retailers are named in a separate petition, MDL No. 3202, that the Panel has not yet decided.