Guides · US compliance
An unqualified Made in USA claim means all or virtually all of the product is of US origin. That is the FTC standard. On a listing the claim does not sit alone: it sits in the same file as your Country of Origin attribute, and a disagreement between the two is the finding, not the phrase itself. The marketplace policies and attribute names below were read from the platforms’ own pages between Aug 5 and Aug 10, 2026; the same-statement rule was measured over real listing copy on Sep 9, 2026.
The FTC enforces by letter and by case, not by a bot. In July 2025 it sent Made in USA letters to Amazon and Walmart about third-party origin claims on their platforms. Walmart’s product claims policy, last updated Jun 5, 2026, requires a Made in the USA claim to be “consistent across images, product packaging and item attributes”, prohibits the claim on an item whose substantial transformation happened outside the US, and names unpublishing as the enforcement (policy page, read Aug 5, 2026). What Amazon does with a mismatch is not recorded in the sources this guide is drawn from, so it does not say.
One boundary on Walmart. Its origin attribute is documented as a customs and duties field, and customs “substantial transformation” is not the FTC’s all-or-virtually-all test. A mismatch there is a policy consistency problem in Walmart’s own words, not an FTC verdict.
| Marketplace | Attribute | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon | country_of_origin (flat-file column, also
country_of_origin1) | The listing flat file. Name verified against Amazon’s own flat-file-to-JSON mapping spreadsheet, read Aug 9, 2026. Whether your Category Listings Report carries the column has not been confirmed against a real report; where it is absent the check renders NOT EVALUATED, never a verdict. |
| Walmart | countryOfOriginSubstantialTransformation | The Item Spec setup file. Mandatory at item creation from Item Spec 5.0 (schema key points, read Aug 9, 2026). Not in the downloadable Item Report: its 48 columns carry no origin field, read Aug 10, 2026. |
Real values are messy and that is fine: “United States (Mainland)”, “U.S.” and “USA” all read as the United States, and a value naming more than one country (“USA, China”) reads as all of them. Only a value that resolves to something other than purely the US can contradict a domestic claim.
Qualified claims are permitted. The qualifier tells the buyer the product is not wholly domestic, in either position: a verb in front of the country, or a disclosure tail after it.
| Copy | Reads as |
|---|---|
| Made in USA or Imported | Qualified. A common US apparel label; it discloses the item may not be domestic. |
| Assembled in USA from imported parts | Qualified, twice over: the verb and the tail. |
| Made in USA from imported parts · with imported materials · from domestic and imported parts | Qualified by the tail. |
| 100% American-made from imported parts · Proudly made in America from imported parts | Qualified. The spelling of the claim does not change what the tail does. |
| Designed in USA · Assembled in the USA · Printed in the USA | Not a domestic-origin claim on their own: the verb is the qualifier. |
| Made in USA and Mexico · Made in USA/Mexico | Joint origin. Qualified by naming the second country; the attribute has to agree with an origin the copy names (below). |
| Made in USA · 100% American-made · Proudly made in USA | Unqualified. Against a Country of Origin of China this is the finding. |
A qualifier binds the claim it is attached to, not the listing. A verb sitting immediately in front of the claim qualifies it: “Designed in U.S. Made in USA” is one statement, separated by nothing but a space. A qualified sentence elsewhere in the copy, about something else, qualifies nothing. The row that made this concrete was a children’s product whose description read “Manufactured in the USA” and, a few words further on, that the bundled book was printed in the USA on recycled board. The book’s printing disclosure does not cure the product’s own claim; an unqualified claim is not cured by a separate qualified sentence about a different component. The test is what sits between the qualifier and the claim. A space, comma, period, semicolon, colon, slash, dash, bracket, ampersand, plus sign or underscore between them keeps them one statement; a word, a pipe, a quotation mark, an exclamation mark or a question mark makes them two.
“Made in USA and Mexico” is qualified by its own text, so a Country of Origin of Mexico agrees with it, and so does “China, Mexico”, because the copy’s Mexico is one of the declared origins. The same copy against China is a different row: naming Mexico is not a disclosure that the goods are Chinese. The copy and the attribute still disagree, one country over, and that disagreement is the finding. The same holds for “Made in USA from Italy olive oil” against Greece.
Two rows, two instructions. The first row’s instruction, followed on the second row, loops.
Pronoia reads your own listings export, the Country of Origin attribute beside the copy that claims one, and credits every qualified shape in the table above. Drop the file on the scan page and it is scored in your browser, nothing uploaded, or email it to audit@trypronoia.com for an audit, free for our first sellers, one each.