2026.08.21 2026.08.21

What Individuals Must Disclose When Selling in Japan: SCTA and the PL Act

swiftwand

There are things you have to write before you press the listing button, and a responsibility that can outlast the sale by a decade. People searching for the disclosure rules usually worry about publishing a home address, but the heavier item sits further along: if something you made injures someone, you can be liable, and that regime does not require you to be selling for profit.

This article covers the two regimes an individual seller in Japan meets first, using published material from the Consumer Affairs Agency, which administers both. It is a general overview rather than legal advice; specific situations turn on their facts, and a lawyer, a consumer affairs centre or the agency itself is the place to take them.

Selling online makes you a distance seller
What has to appear in the advertisement
The name and address question
Vague return terms are not terms
The Product Liability Act does not require profit
Ten years from delivery
What about selling data
Sources

忍者AdMax

Selling online makes you a distance seller

The agency guidance treats selling goods where orders are received over the internet as mail order under the Specified Commercial Transactions Act, auction formats included. A seller is someone who sells as a business, and doing something as a business means carrying out transactions repeatedly and continuously with an intent to profit. Where that applies, you are a business operator whether you are a company or an individual.

Listing regularly on a marketplace to earn money meets that description. Being small does not take you outside it.

What has to appear in the advertisement

Mail order carries a defined list of items that must be shown. The main ones are the price including postage, when and how payment is made, when the goods are delivered, the terms of any return or cancellation policy, the name, address and telephone number of the seller, the operating environment where software is involved, and the seller responsibility where goods do not conform to the contract.

Alongside disclosure there are conduct rules, including a prohibition on exaggerated advertising and restrictions on sending advertising email to people who have not consented. A claim that something will never break, with nothing behind it, is a problem under that heading as well.

The name and address question

The starting principle in the guidance is that making clear who is responsible is essential to doing business, so a name must be shown whether the seller is a company or an individual. For an individual operator that means a real name, not a shop name or a handle.

Two things are worth separating here. The requirement concerns what must be disclosed, and marketplaces differ in how they let you satisfy it, some providing arrangements that avoid publishing a private address to every visitor. Check what your platform offers rather than assuming either that you must publish everything or that the platform has handled it for you.

Vague return terms are not terms

Mail order carries a statutory right to return goods within eight days where the seller has not set out its own return terms. The agency guidance is explicit that wording such as returns considered on a case by case basis does not amount to telling the buyer in advance whether returns are possible; where a return policy exists, its content has to be stated clearly.

So keeping it vague to stay flexible does not work. Left ambiguous, you are operating with no policy at all, which means accepting returns within eight days. Three decisions are enough to fix it: whether you accept returns, within what period, and who pays return postage and any fees.

The Product Liability Act does not require profit

The Product Liability Act lets a person who suffers loss of life, bodily injury or property damage caused by a defect in a product claim damages from the manufacturer. The agency explains it as a special rule within tort law whose distinguishing feature is that the claimant proves a defect rather than negligence. The question is not whether you were careless; it is whether the thing was defective.

Manufacturer is defined as a person who manufactures, processes or imports as a business, and the agency Q and A reads as a business to mean carrying out the same kind of act repeatedly and continuously, stating that neither a profit motive nor payment is a requirement. Under the Specified Commercial Transactions Act a seller needs an intent to profit; here that element is absent. Items given away for free can fall within the regime if you make them repeatedly. Not selling them is not an answer to this statute.

A product means movable property that has been manufactured or processed. Real estate, electricity, software and unprocessed agricultural, forestry, livestock and fishery products are outside it; second-hand goods are inside. A 3D printed object sits squarely within the definition. A defect means the product lacks the safety it ordinarily should provide, which is not the same as being merely imperfect.

One limit is important. Damage confined to the product itself is outside the regime; there has to be harm beyond it, to a person or to other property. That gives a usable way to rank risk: does this item sit where its failure reaches a person or another object. A shelf ornament, a load bearing bracket and an enclosure carrying electricity are in very different positions even when all three come off the same printer.

Ten years from delivery

Claims are limited to three years from when the injured party knew of the damage and the liable party, and to ten years from when the manufacturer delivered the product. The agency explains that the ten year clock starts at delivery by the manufacturer rather than when the item reached the consumer.

Sell prints as a side activity for a couple of years and stop, and the period on the last item you posted still runs for ten years from that day. Two practical consequences follow: keep sales records so you can reconstruct what you sold and when, and keep design and material records, because settings and filament choices are exactly what memory loses first.

There are defences, but narrow ones: that the state of scientific and technical knowledge at the time of delivery did not allow the defect to be recognised, and that a component defect was due solely to the design instructions of another manufacturer without negligence on your part. Neither is a general escape hatch.

What about selling data

Software is named among the exclusions from the definition of a product, so a design file is not covered by this framework. Being outside the Product Liability Act is not the same as carrying no responsibility. Selling a file is still mail order, the disclosure duties still apply, and the required items expressly include the operating environment for software.

The minimum line is short. Write the required items properly, state your return policy in specific terms, and understand that anything you physically make and hand over carries a ten year tail whether or not you charged for it. Knowing that before you start is what makes it possible to choose lower risk products, or to decide the risk is not for you.