Amazon said on Thursday evening that it received about $600 million in tariff refunds in the second quarter and will automatically reimburse some customers when it can trace those import charges to specific orders. The company said the money will not flow back to shoppers in every case, because many of the costs were either absorbed or could not be tied to a customer purchase.
Brian Olsavsky said Amazon is participating in the tariff refund process and that the refund pool is limited for two reasons: the company forward-bought and pre-positioned inventory to avoid tariff costs, and it is not the importer of record for most items sold in its store. In those cases, suppliers usually handle imports and pay the tariffs, which makes direct customer refunds harder to identify.
The disclosure lands after consumers filed a class action lawsuit in federal court in Seattle in May, arguing that shoppers were owed refunds for tariff-inflated prices and alleging Amazon was not pursuing refunds in order to curry favor with Donald Trump. It also gives a dollar figure to a problem that had already been showing up in prices. In January, Andy Jassy said tariffs were beginning to push up prices on Amazon's platform, even as Amazon and many of its third-party sellers had stocked up ahead of the levies to keep prices flat.
Olsavsky said Amazon had largely absorbed tariff-related cost increases rather than passing them on, but that it had identified a limited set of circumstances where it could trace specific import charges to customers. When those refunds arrive, he said, Amazon will proactively contact affected customers and automatically issue reimbursements. In other cases, he said, the company will use the refunds to support low prices, which means most of the $600 million is unlikely to show up as cash back for shoppers.
That split matters because outside sellers account for more than 60% of goods sold on Amazon's marketplace, and many of those sellers import goods themselves and have already sought their own refunds. Some sellers also said Amazon penalized their listings after they tried to pass higher tariff costs on to shoppers earlier this year. The open question now is not whether Amazon got the money back, but how much of it can be matched to actual customers before the rest is folded into pricing.
