The FTC on Oct. 28 ordered Walmart, Target and seven other companies to hand over how they use personal data to set prices.
If you run a Shopify store, this reaches you. The questions the agency is asking big retailers (does the price change from person to person, and does the customer know?) apply to any Ecommerce Paradise reader who sends segmented discount codes, prices by location, or quotes high-ticket orders by phone based on what you know about the buyer.
The orders are a study, not a lawsuit. But they land on top of a proposed FTC policy statement from August and a stack of state laws, and together they show where enforcement is heading. Below: what the FTC asked for, how we got here, what it means for a high-ticket store, and the audit I’d run this week.
Buyers who wonder why a price is what it is check your domain first. Put the store on its own branded domain with email behind it, so your pricing and disclosure pages carry your name and not a free subdomain. Register your store domain with Namecheap →
FTC Orders Walmart, Target and 7 Others to Detail Pricing Data
The FTC issued special orders under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act on Oct. 28, according to its press release. The Commission voted 2-0 to approve them. Section 6(b) lets the agency run broad studies without a specific law enforcement purpose.
Nine companies received orders: Delta, United and JetBlue in airlines, Lyft and Uber in ride-sharing, DoorDash and Instacart in food delivery, and the retailers Target and Walmart. The release does not sort Target and Walmart into a category.
The orders ask whether the price of a ticket, ride, delivery or other product varies from person to person. The FTC lists loyalty program participation and analysis of personal data by what it calls “superintelligence algorithms” as possible drivers. For the ride-sharing and delivery firms, the agency also wants documentation of how worker pay is set, including whether it draws on driver data such as phone usage or acceptance history on past offers.
Recipients have 45 days from receipt to respond. If a company does not comply, the Commission can seek enforcement in federal court, per the release.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson framed the inquiry around transparency. “We intend to scrutinize the opaque methodology that some companies in these industries may be using,” he said in the release. He added: “Consumers deserve to know whether companies use their web surfing habits or other personal data.”
The release says the agency’s 2024 personalized pricing study looked only at middleman consultancies, not the companies that set prices, and that it learned nothing about actual pricing decisions. Bloomberg Law, which reported the orders the same day, says the FTC now views that earlier approach as mistaken. This round goes to the companies themselves.
Aug. 19 Policy Statement, State Laws and the Dollar General Suit
The orders are the second federal move in ten weeks. On Aug. 19 the FTC proposed an enforcement policy statement on personalized pricing, also by a 2-0 vote, according to a Holland & Knight analysis. Comments are open for 30 days after Federal Register publication under Docket No. FTC-2026-1057. The firm’s alert does not give the publication date, so I can’t tell you the exact deadline.
The proposed statement defines personalized pricing as using personal data to set a price based on the company’s estimate of how much a particular consumer will pay. Where consumers reasonably expect a price not to vary with their personal data, the FTC says failing to disclose the personalization is likely an unfair or deceptive practice under Section 5. The disclosure has to be clear and conspicuous, and it has to say three things: the price is personalized, what the personalization is based on, and which types of data were used.
Vague wording does not count. Holland & Knight reports that a label like “specially selected” is considered misleading. A disclosure tying the price to estimated willingness to pay, based on the customer’s earlier purchases through the same login, would likely suffice if accurate and complete.
Ferguson was direct about the limits, per the same analysis: the FTC lacks authority to ban personalized pricing outright but may act against businesses that don’t disclose how personal data sets a price. A footnote in the statement says the agency “declines at this time to take any position” on whether fully disclosed personalized pricing can still be unfair, according to King & Spalding.
States are moving faster. Holland & Knight lists New Jersey’s Fair Price Protection Act, signed July 23, 2026, which bans personalized algorithmic pricing for grocery retailers and delivery platforms. It lists Maryland’s ban on surveillance pricing for food retailers and Connecticut’s disclosure requirement, both effective Oct. 1, 2026. New York’s One Fair Price Act passed the legislature June 10 and awaits the governor’s signature, in that firm’s account.
The law firm summaries do not fully agree. King & Spalding says California, New York, Maryland, Connecticut and New Jersey have all passed laws limiting or banning certain surveillance pricing, and describes Connecticut’s law as a general bar with exceptions for legitimate discounts and rewards. Consumer Finance Monitor adds that eleven other states introduced surveillance-pricing bills this year and that nearly every state has a consumer protection statute some courts read in line with FTC Section 5 guidance. Read the statute for any state you ship into.
Congress is circling too. A Senate Judiciary hearing on Aug. 4 drew bipartisan concern, and Sen. Josh Hawley said he intends to pursue legislation, per Consumer Finance Monitor.
Two days before the 6(b) orders, the FTC and 20 states sued Dollar General for charging more at the register than on the shelf. I covered that in my write-up of the Dollar General suit. That case is about a price shown versus a price charged. This one is about whether the price you were shown was built just for you.
Different mechanism, same theme: the FTC is treating the price a customer sees as a promise, and it wants to know what sits behind it.
There is a real counterpoint. Dr. John Zhang, a witness at the Aug. 4 Senate hearing, argued that personalized pricing can benefit price-sensitive consumers and that policymakers should target “abusive surveillance and market power, not every form of price variation,” per Consumer Finance Monitor. The FTC’s own proposal leaves room for legitimate variation. It distinguishes personalized pricing from changes driven by supply, demand, geography or taxes. A witness at the same hearing, Lee Hepner, pushed for a broad prohibition with narrow exceptions for transparent discounts and equally available loyalty benefits.
Nothing is final. The policy statement is proposed, the orders gather information, and neither creates a new rule. The rules that already bind a store, like the ones in my dropshipping taxes and legal requirements checklist, are settled. This one is still being written, which is the best time to get your house in order.
What Personalized Pricing Rules Mean for High-Ticket Stores
My read: you are not Walmart, and you will not be the first name on an FTC list. But the legal theory in the August statement does not care about size. It cares about whether a customer reasonably expected a uniform price and whether you used their data to move it without saying so. That describes more small-store tactics than most owners realize.
Here is where I’d look. An abandoned-cart flow that sends 10% off to returning visitors and nothing to new ones uses purchase history to set price. A discount code emailed only to people who viewed a $4,000 product three times uses browsing data. Prices that differ by country or state through Shopify Markets are geography-based, which the FTC says it separates from personalization. A phone rep who quotes a higher number to a buyer who mentions an urgent event is the most personal pricing of all, and nothing on the website discloses it.
Tools make this easy to do by accident. Klaviyo will happily segment by behavior and fire a different offer at each segment. Repricing apps adjust by visitor signals. Neither is illegal on its face. The risk sits in the combination of personal data, an unequal price and silence.
Take a hypothetical store selling $3,000 patio sets. It sends first-time visitors a 5% code and returning cart-abandoners 10%, roughly 40 recoveries a month. The 5% gap is $150 per order, about $6,000 a month in discount spread. If a state attorney general treated each undisclosed order as a violation, the exposure is the count of orders, not the dollar gap. I’m not predicting that outcome. I’m showing why a $150 difference is not the number to focus on.
I’d sort store practices into three buckets. Low exposure: one public price, plus sitewide codes anyone can claim. Medium: segment-only codes where an equivalent offer is easy for anyone to find or request. High: any per-visitor repricing, and any quote that moves with data about the buyer’s situation, budget or urgency. Medium and high deserve plain disclosure at or before checkout, and the high bucket deserves a hard look at whether you should do it at all.
The FTC says disclosure must happen at or before purchase, not in a buried terms page, per King & Spalding. A privacy policy line will not carry it. Tools like Termly can generate the privacy policy and consent banner, but the pricing disclosure itself is copy you write on the product or checkout page.
Data you collect for one purpose is another weak spot. California’s attorney general has opened investigations under the state privacy law’s purpose-limitation provisions, per Holland & Knight. If you collected an email for order updates and then use browsing history to price an offer, expect that question.
Fraud and risk tools raise a related point. A fraud score that blocks or surcharges orders uses personal data to decide what a buyer pays or whether they can buy. Services such as ClearSale exist to protect you from chargebacks. My guide on chargeback prevention for high-ticket stores covers the settings. Keep fraud screening separate from pricing so you never confuse the two when someone asks.
The same attention applies to AI agents shopping on your store. Walmart opened to outside shopping agents with spending limits, as I covered in Walmart opens to AI shopping agents. Shopify’s Fall Edition added AI shopping controls, which I broke down in the Shopify Fall Edition piece. When a bot comparison-shops your price, the price it sees should match the price a human sees.
Pricing logic scattered across apps, codes, flows and phone scripts is exactly what’s hard to audit and exactly what fails when an attorney general asks for it. If you want a team to own the store’s operations while you decide the policy, my team’s turnkey done-for-you store build and management is built so pricing rules live in one place and one person can explain them.
Pricing rules scattered across apps, codes and phone scripts are hard to defend. Want my team to scale the store you already have, with one documented pricing policy? See the scaling service →
Audit Your Store’s Pricing Logic Before the Policy Goes Final
Walmart’s Black Friday events start Nov. 12, per my Walmart Black Friday post, and your own discount sends will climb with them. Run these five steps before the first send.
- List every place a price or discount can change: Shopify automatic discounts and codes, Klaviyo flows and segments, repricing or bundle apps, Markets pricing, and your phone and chat scripts. If you use scheduled catalog price changes in Shopify Rollouts, include those.
- Tag each one by what data drives it: nothing (public price), geography, purchase history, browsing behavior, or what the rep learned about the buyer. Anything in the last three rows needs a decision.
- For each tagged item, pick one: make the offer public to everyone, add a plain disclosure at or before checkout stating the price is personalized, what it’s based on and which data it uses, or turn it off. Do not use phrases like “special offer for you” as a stand-in for that disclosure.
- Write a one-page phone and chat quoting policy: what a rep may and may not use to set a quote, and a note in the CRM when a discount is given and why. A free CRM such as HubSpot works for this. My HubSpot setup guide for high-ticket stores shows the pipeline stages to use.
- Record calls where the rep quotes, with consent, and keep the pricing policy in a shared folder in Google Workspace. A business line through Quo keeps calls and texts in one searchable place. If a regulator or a customer asks why two buyers saw different numbers, you want the answer in minutes.
If your niche is regulated on top of this, such as supplements, you already live with FTC rules on claims, and pricing disclosure belongs in the same review. Jewelry sellers face the same pressure, as I covered in my dropshipping jewelry guide. For anything involving a state attorney general or a letter, talk to a lawyer. I’m not one, and this is reporting, not legal advice.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did the FTC sue Walmart or Target?
No. The Oct. 28 orders are a Section 6(b) study with a 45-day response window, per the FTC. They gather information and carry no penalty by themselves, though the Commission can go to federal court if a company refuses to comply.
Is personalized pricing illegal?
Not as a blanket rule. The FTC says in its proposed statement that Congress has not given it authority to prohibit personalized pricing in all circumstances. It says failing to disclose it, where customers expect a uniform price, is likely unfair or deceptive. Some states go further for food retailers and delivery platforms.
Does a public sitewide sale code count as personalized pricing?
A code anyone can claim does not set a price from a person’s data. The sources I read do not address coupons or loyalty discounts directly, so ask a lawyer about edge cases such as codes sent only to one segment. Keep the offer public where you can.
Does this apply to a small Shopify store?
The orders do not. The theory in the proposed statement and in state consumer protection laws is not limited by size. King & Spalding advises businesses to review algorithmic and data-driven pricing now rather than wait for a final policy.
Are location-based prices a problem?
The FTC proposal distinguishes personalized pricing from variation driven by supply, demand, geography or taxes. Pricing by country or state through channel-specific product data in Shopify is a different thing from pricing by what you know about one buyer. State laws can still differ, so check the ones where you sell.
Where do I find high-margin niches if pricing gets stricter?
Start with my free high-ticket niches list. Then read the full niches guide to compare margins before you commit.
Want a second set of eyes on your pricing, discounts and quoting scripts? Book 1-on-1 coaching and we’ll go through your setup line by line. Get the coaching details →
If you want help deciding which of these changes matter for your store, Explore Turnkey Builds. Subscribe to the YouTube channel for daily breakdowns. More breaking news coming through the day.
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- Dropshipping Scams to Avoid in 2026: 10 Red Flags and Real FTC Cases
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Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and world traveler from Seattle, Washington, and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
He maintains homes in Seattle and Bali, spends most of the year overseas, and usually returns to Seattle for about a month each summer.
