“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” runs the caption of a famous New Yorker cartoon. Yet in e-commerce, identity matters. And, in e-commerce, nobody is bigger than Amazon—the second company in the history of the world to achieve a trillion-dollar valuation. At latest count, Amazon boasts 310 million customers, 90 million of which are “prime” members. That’s a lot of retail sales daily.  But who are you dealing with when you buy goods on Amazon? It is not always clear: Amazon itself? A chain store? A local merchant? A fly-by-night manufacturer of cheap goods in a foreign country? This is important because Amazon sells a lot of things; some explode, causing serious injury. Recent examples of products causing injuries include cell phone chargers, electronic cigarettes and hoverboards. Yet, courts have consistently left consumers who purchase such items through Amazon without a remedy.

In a recent case, Heather Oberdorf purchased a retractable dog leash on the Amazon website. Ms. Oberdorf claimed that the leash malfunctioned and struck her in the eye, causing permanent injury. Amazon defended, saying that they were not the seller. They had merely facilitated the transaction for a firm called The Furry Gang, now nowhere to be found (metaphorically, the dog). A federal court sided with Amazon, saying that Ms. Oberdorf could not state a claim under product liability or contract law against Amazon because it wasn’t’ the seller. Further, Amazon was protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that insulates internet platforms from liability for statements of third-party content providers. Taken together these conclusions left Ms. Oberdorf utterly without recourse. Paradoxically, the same would not have been true if she had purchased the leash at PetSmart. Brick-and-mortar merchants are answerable to their customers; Amazon, apparently, is not. In the modern e-commerce environment, this distinction is untenable and, in Amazon’s case, misleading.