Direct Sellers Update: Regulation, Law & Policy

In today’s digital marketplace, direct sellers rely heavily on electronic agreements to govern their relationships with customers, vendors, and partners. But whether these electronic agreements are enforceable depends, at least in part, on how your policies and other terms are presented to users and the way assent is obtained. Courts scrutinize these issues closely, emphasizing that even minor design choices can make the difference between a binding electronic agreement and an unenforceable set of terms.

As we’ve written previously, direct selling companies are facing a wave of lawsuits, primarily in California, claiming that distributors do not qualify as independent contractors and instead are misclassified employees. Just recently, however, a California court refused to certify a class on these claims—an important outcome for all direct sellers.

Direct Sellers, time to let out a sigh of relief. On September 5, 2025, the Federal Trade Commission officially dropped its appeal of a federal court’s decision striking down the FTC’s rule banning non-competes.

The FTC’s much-anticipated “Click to Cancel” Rule was nixed, but the FTC is not backing down. The FTC continues to use Section 5 of the FTC Act and various other regulations to bring enforcement actions against companies that fail to provide clear and conspicuous disclosures about recurring charges and easy-to-cancel options for consumers.