General Liability Insurance for Ecommerce Sellers

General Liability (a.k.a commercial liability insurance or business liability insurance) is the foundation policy required of nearly every ecommerce seller. It covers third-party bodily injury claims, third-party property damage, and Personal & Advertising Injury (slander, libel, copyright infringement) caused by your products or business operations.

It is the type of coverage Amazon requires you to carry if you are a seller on Amazon, and the foundation Walmart, Target, Costco, Sam’s Club, and TikTok Shop also require for their seller and vendor programs.

Amazon’s minimum is $1,000,000 per occurrence in commercial general liability with Products and Completed Operations included, and Amazon listed as Additional Insured on your COI.

That is the floor, not the right answer. Most sellers we insure carry $2M occurrence / $4M aggregate or higher because real exposure scales with sales velocity, retailer requirements, and product class — not Amazon’s minimum.

Many clients ask “Does general liability insurance cover product liability?” and the answer is “it depends on your insurer and the claim.” Most ecommerce GL policies include Products and Completed Operations coverage inside the GL form. That covers bodily injury and property damage caused by your product after it leaves your hands.

What general liability does NOT cover: design defect, manufacturing defect, recall expense, errors & omissions for formulators, contamination losses, or hidden defects like toxic chemicals. Usually, product liability insurance is necessary for design and manufacturing errors, and we pair it with GL inside one program.

Commercial general liability (CGL), commercial liability insurance, and business liability insurance are three names for the same policy. They reference the standard ISO-form CGL policy that every U.S. business carrier writes.

What varies between carriers is the endorsements, limits, exclusions, and class appetite. Hiscox, Next, Embroker, Founder Shield, Chubb, and Hartford all use the same base form, but their endorsements and ecommerce class appetite are not built for sellers and brand owners.

Hiscox and Next are direct-to-consumer carriers built for generic small businesses. For ecommerce sellers, they typically:

• Cap limits at $1M occurrence / $2M aggregate — insufficient for Walmart, Target, Costco, Sam’s Club vendor programs
• Exclude or sub-limit recall expense to $25K–$50K — not workable for branded ecommerce
• Apply class restrictions to supplements, beauty, baby, ingestibles, CBD, and other regulated ecom verticals
• Issue COIs through automated systems that don’t handle Amazon’s exact Additional Insured spec on the first pass

For a typical Amazon FBA or Shopify seller without supplements, beauty, baby, or other regulated classes, GL premium starts at $500–$1,200 per year for $1M occurrence / $2M aggregate.

For brand owners, manufacturers, and formulators with regulated products (supplements, beauty, baby, ingestibles, pet, CBD), premium scales with revenue, product class, recall risk, and required limits. The right answer is usually a quote on your specific revenue, product mix, and retailer requirements rather than a generic online estimate.

Yes. The Personal & Advertising Injury coverage section of a general liability policy covers claims of slander, libel, or copyright infringement made against your company.

This matters more for ecommerce than most sellers realize: comparative advertising claims on Amazon listings, influencer photography and likeness usage, music in TikTok and Reels content, and stock-image misuse all generate Personal & Advertising Injury claims. We see them more often than we see traditional bodily injury.