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Amazon faces legal scrutiny in the US after FTC lawsuit

On August 31st, the Federal Trade Commission of the United States filed a lawsuit against Amazon for allegedly overcharging advertisers on their platform by manipulating the bidding system. Here's what we know so far.

Emil Beck

Sep 08, 2026

•Sep 10, 2026

•1 min read

Key Takeaways

The FTC of the United States has accused Amazon of manipulating their auction systems, leading advertisers to pay higher prices without their knowledge.
Amazon has responded to these claims, stating that the lawsuit is misguided and that there is no evidence of manipulated price increases for brands.
There is no data to support that the situation in the US has been replicated in European markets.

What happened?

Last Monday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the United States presented a lawsuit against Amazon for allegedly "secretly and systematically" overcharging advertisers on their platform by manipulating certain advertising auctions.

According to the FTC, Amazon may have used dynamic price floor mechanisms, or “soft reserves”, which could have resulted in some advertisers paying a higher Cost-per-Click (CPC) than would have been expected based solely on the true second-highest bid.

How the bidding system normally works: the second-price auction

Imagine three advertisers bidding for the same sponsored placement on Amazon search results: Advertiser A has a max bid of €1.00, Advertiser B has a max bid of €0.60, and Advertiser C has a max bid of €0.40. In a true second-price auction, Advertiser A wins, but only pays one cent more than the second-highest bid. So they pay €0.61, not their full €1.00.

What we know so far

Although it is too early to draw any definitive conclusions, given the situation, we decided to review historical data to determine if this issue could be seen in European markets.

After going over the historical CPC trends across different categories between 2021 and 2026, we did not see a sustained inflation of this metric in Europe. Despite temporary peaks and increases in specific countries and periods of time, this is not a consistent trend. Hence, we cannot directly link the pattern to the practices that are currently under legal scrutiny in the United States.

Important

It is worth remembering that CPC fluctuations are caused by a myriad of factors, including changes in competitive intensity, demand, seasonality, campaign and product mix, bidding strategies and developments within the platform.

How we mitigate this risk

We actively manage bids and CPC limits
We work with segmented campaign structures
We use automatic campaigns with controlled bids
We continuously review and optimize search terms
We evaluate performance beyond CPC alone
We closely monitor CPC trends by market in order to identify unusual movements or increases

At Remazing, we will continue monitoring CPC developments to promptly identify any anomalies, as well as analyzing the current situation in the US and how it unfolds, making sure to protect our clients' advertising investments.