The Competition Appeal Tribunal certified part of a collective claim against Apple and Amazon on 28 September, clearing for trial an allegation that the two companies agreed in October 2018 to restrict which sellers could offer Apple and Beats products on Amazon’s UK marketplace. The certified part is valued by the claimant at £289 million assuming 8 percent interest, or £306 million assuming 10 percent.
Brand gating has been treated across the European reseller market as a commercial fact of life. A UK tribunal has now agreed to hear whether one instance of it was unlawful, and has put a number on what it would be worth if it was.
What was certified and what was refused
The claim came in two halves and only one survived. The tribunal certified the On-Amazon claim, covering Apple products bought through Amazon’s marketplace, finding that it “clearly passes the Microsoft test, in terms of the methodology proposed”. That half proceeds on an opt-out basis.
The Off-Amazon claim, covering products bought directly from Apple and from other retailers, was refused. The tribunal held that “we do not consider that the evidence before us satisfies that test”, and that the claimant’s economic analysis for that half “does not set out a sufficiently credible methodology that is grounded in the facts of the case” and lacks “a consistent and coherent theory of harm”.
The refused half is the more instructive one. The theory behind it was that restricting resellers on Amazon raised prices everywhere, not only on Amazon. That is the argument a seller makes when they say gating distorts a whole category, and it is the argument the tribunal said had not been made well enough to put to a trial. Damages for it were never quantified.
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The conduct described
The judgment records the claims as alleging that Apple and Amazon entered into a series of agreements, in particular in October 2018, with two limbs. The first excluded resellers from Amazon’s UK marketplace other than Apple-authorised resellers. The second restricted advertising, limiting what competitors could buy on the platform.
The second limb is the one the trade press has largely skipped and the one a seller should read twice. An agreement about who may sell is a supply question. An agreement about who may advertise against a brand term is a visibility question, and visibility is the thing most independent resellers are actually fighting for.
The class is consumers, not sellers: all natural persons who bought one or more Apple or Beats-branded products at retail in the United Kingdom between 31 October 2018 and 15 December 2025. Six corporate defendants are named, three Apple entities and three Amazon ones including Amazon EU and Amazon Europe Core.
What the number is and is not
The £289 million and £306 million are the claimant’s own estimates of aggregate damages for the certified half, and the difference between them is not two views of the harm. It is the same principal with interest run at 8 percent and at 10 percent. Nothing has been awarded, nothing has been proved, and certification is a ruling that a case is fit to be tried rather than a finding that it is right.
Spread across every UK adult who bought an Apple or Beats product over seven years, the per-person figure is small. That is normal for an opt-out consumer class action and it is why the mechanism exists: the loss is too small for anyone to litigate individually and large enough in aggregate to be worth a company’s attention.
Both companies deny it. Apple says it strongly disagrees and that the arrangement was aimed at tackling counterfeit products on the marketplace. Amazon says the remaining claim is without merit and that it expects to see it resolved in its favour. The counterfeit defence is the one to watch, because it is the justification every brand gives for gating, and a trial would test it on evidence for the first time.
Why a consumer claim matters to a seller
No reseller gets paid if this succeeds. The class is shoppers, and the compensation, if any, flows to them. What changes for a seller is the status of the practice.
Until now, a brand-and-marketplace arrangement that thins out third-party resellers has carried commercial risk for the excluded seller and none for the parties to it. If a tribunal finds that such an arrangement inflated retail prices, the arrangement carries a quantified liability, and every legal team reviewing a selective distribution agreement in the UK has a new case to read.
That is a slow change and a real one. It does not restore anyone’s selling privileges and it does not create a cause of action for a seller who was refused approval. It makes a defence that was previously assumed, that gating is simply brand protection, into something a court will examine.
For the business operator
This is a United Kingdom ruling about United Kingdom purchasers. It is not an EU judgment and it does not bind any member state court, so a Dutch or German reseller reading it has a persuasive example and nothing more. Do not let anyone put it in a deck as a European development.
If you have been removed from a branded listing or refused approval to sell a brand, start keeping the record properly: dates, the wording of the refusal, who else remained on the listing, and what happened to the price afterwards. The refused Off-Amazon half failed on exactly that kind of evidence, and the lesson is that the theory is only as good as the documentation underneath it.
Review your own distribution agreements if you are on the brand side. The limb that got certified is about who may sell; the limb that got less attention is about who may advertise. An agreement that quietly restricts competitor ad purchases is now a clause with litigation attached to it.
From the consumer’s side
The shopper in this case never saw a decision being made. They saw a listing with fewer sellers on it, which looks identical to a listing that simply has fewer sellers, and they paid whatever price that produced. That invisibility is the whole reason the loss has to be litigated collectively.
It also explains the counterfeit defence’s strength. Buyers genuinely do prefer a marketplace where a charger is what it claims to be, and they cannot tell from the outside whether a thinner listing is protecting them or costing them. A trial would have to put a figure on both sides of that trade, which is something no marketplace has so far been required to do in public.
The three-line version
If you run marketplace or channel compliance, treat this as the first time brand gating has been priced rather than complained about. The line to take upward is that a UK tribunal has certified a £289 million claim about who was allowed to sell an Apple product, and that the advertising limb is as important as the selling limb.
If you have just taken on brand or distribution strategy, the gap this exposes is evidential. Most companies have no dated record of listing exclusions, their reasons or their price effects, and the half of this claim that failed, failed for want of exactly that.
If you sign the budget, nothing here is a spend decision. No damages have been awarded, the class is consumers rather than sellers, and the trial is years out. Refuse any proposal that treats certification as a finding of liability, because it is not one.
Sources
Competition Appeal Tribunal, JLP A&A Class Representative Limited v Apple Inc. and Others, Judgment (CPO), 28 September 2026, [2026] CAT 75: https://www.catribunal.org.uk/cases/17597725-jlp-aa-class-representative-limited
Reuters, Apple, Amazon face revived UK consumer lawsuit over product sales: https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/09/28/apple-and-amazon-face-revived-uk-consumer-lawsuit-over-product-sales