The INFORM Consumers Act, explained

What the law is

The Integrity, Notification, and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces for Consumers Act (the INFORM Consumers Act) was signed in December 2022 as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023, and took effect on June 27, 2023. It answers a simple problem: marketplace storefronts could sell at serious volume while disclosing nothing about who was behind them.

The law puts the burden on the marketplace, not the seller. Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and every other online marketplace must collect identity information from high-volume third-party sellers, verify it, and (above a revenue threshold) show part of it to buyers.

Who counts as a high-volume seller

A high-volume third-party seller is one with 200 or more discrete sales of new or unused consumer products AND $5,000 or more in gross revenue, in any continuous 12-month period during the previous 24 months. Both conditions must hold: a seller with three big-ticket sales or thousands of one-dollar ones doesn't qualify.

What marketplaces must collect and verify

Within ten days of a seller crossing the threshold, the marketplace must collect (and within another ten days verify) three things:

• A bank account number (or, if the seller has none, the name of the payee for its transactions).
• A business tax ID (or a taxpayer ID if the seller has no business tax ID).
• Working contact information: a name or business identity documents, plus a functioning email address and phone number.

Sellers must re-certify this information annually. A seller that won't comply gets suspended — the law makes non-disclosure a listing-ending event, not a paperwork footnote.

What buyers actually see

For sellers with $20,000 or more in annual gross revenue, the marketplace must clearly disclose the seller's full name (or company name), physical address, and contact information, either on the product listing page (a link is allowed) or in the order confirmation and the buyer's transaction history. On Amazon, this surfaces on the seller profile page reached from the "Sold by" link on a listing.

There is one carve-out: a seller certifying it has only a residential address can have the street address withheld: the marketplace then shows only the country (and state, where applicable), with a note that the seller answers consumer inquiries.

Who enforces it

The FTC enforces the Act, with violations eligible for civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation (the 2025 inflation-adjusted figure, still current as of mid-2026), and state attorneys general can also sue. The first enforcement action came in September 2025: Temu paid a $2 million penalty over failures to disclose high-volume sellers' identities and to provide the required mechanism for reporting suspicious activity.

Why it matters for brand data

The disclosures the Act forces into the open are public record — legal names, countries, and addresses for the sellers actually operating marketplace storefronts. Joined with the USPTO trademark register, they answer a question neither record answers alone: is the seller of record the same company that owns the brand?

That join is this site's foundation. The free brand check reads it for any brand, and the sellers.json feed publishes the resolved seller identities in bulk.