Product Liability
Injury or damage caused by products you make or sell.
Guides
- Technology Company Insurance: The 2026 Liability Playbook
A technology company's insurance is rarely a risk decision. It is a condition of the deals you need to close — the enterprise customer's contract, the office lease, the data you hold, and the products you ship. Those requirements decide most of what you carry. This playbook maps the five exposures that generate technology claims to the liability line each one belongs to, who can assert it, and what the other party will demand before they sign.
Public record case files
- A marketplace's role can put it in the product-liability chain
Amazon’s marketplace label did not automatically keep it outside a product-liability claim. The court said Amazon could face the claim because it stored, listed, charged for, and shipped the third-party seller’s battery. The decision is about Amazon’s role in that California case, not a rule that every marketplace is liable.
Questions
- Amazon seller insurance requirements — what do I actually need? Amazon requires commercial liability insurance — at least $1 million per occurrence — within 30 days of exceeding $10,000 in gross sales in a month, or whenever Amazon asks. That is Section 9 of the Business Solutions Agreement, not any law. The policy must cover every product you list and name Amazon as an additional insured.
- Do you need insurance to sell on Etsy? No — Etsy's Seller Policy contains no insurance requirement, unlike Amazon's $1 million mandate. But Etsy's terms leave you fully liable for what you sell, and its Purchase Protection program resolves order disputes, not injury claims. If you make candles, soap, skincare, food, or children's items, product liability is the exposure that matters.
- Does product liability insurance cover software? Almost never, and the reason is structural: product liability responds to bodily injury and damage to tangible property, while a software failure typically causes financial loss and corrupted data — which general liability policies treat as neither. Software failures are a tech E&O question. The exception is software embedded in physical products that hurt people.
- Product or general liability insurance — which do I need? Usually they're the same purchase. For most sellers and makers, product liability isn't a separate policy — it's the products-completed operations coverage built into commercial general liability. Standalone products policies exist for manufacturers and hard-to-place product lines. What matters is that your policy covers products claims, not which label the coverage wears.
- What is the difference between product liability and completed-operations liability? No — product liability and completed-operations liability describe different causes of third-party injury or property damage. Product liability follows a defective or inadequately warned product through the supply chain; completed operations follows defective work after a contractor’s operation is complete or put to use. A CGL may place both in one products-completed-operations hazard, but the allegations still matter.