The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has approved a final consent order in its first-ever enforcement action in a case of “review hijacking,” or when a merchant steals consumer reviews about another product to increase its own sales. In this case, the FTC ordered supplement retailer The Bountiful Company, maker of Nature’s Bounty vitamins and other brands, to pay $600,000 for misleading customers on Amazon where it used a feature to merge reviews. of different products so that some seem to have better ratings and reviews than they otherwise would have had if marketed under their own listings.
The case exposes how sellers exploited an Amazon feature that allows sellers to request the creation of “variation” relationships between different products and SKUs. The feature is meant to help marketers and consumers alike, as it creates a single details page on Amazon.com that displays similar products that differ only narrowly and specifically, the FTC says — like color items , size, quantity or flavor. For example, a t-shirt might have a dozen SKUs associated with each other because the t-shirt comes in a wide variety of colors. For shoppers, it’s helpful to see all the options on one page so you can choose the item that best suits your needs and budget. In the case of supplements, the feature could be used to combine the same products by merging multiple SKUs featuring different quantities of the item in question, such as 50, 100, or 200 pill bottles, for example.
However, The Bountiful Company leveraged Amazon’s functionality to merge its new products with older, well-established products that had different wordings, the FTC said.
In one example, the retailer asked Amazon to merge newer supplements like Nature’s Bounty Stress Comfort Mood Booster and Nature’s Bounty Stress Comfort Peace of Mind Stress Relief Gummies with three other products: Nature’s Bounty Anxiety & Stress Relief Ashwagandha KSM-66 tablets , Nature’s Bounty Botanical Sleeping Tablets and Nature’s Bounty Valerian Root Capsules.
Not only did the old products have different formulations from the new ones, they also had different formulations from each other. In an August 2020 internal company, the company even said that the approximately 1,000 ratings and 4.5-star average ratings of new products were due to this variation relationship. Prior to the merger, Stress Comfort had only 26 reviews and 3.2 stars. In the email, an e-commerce manager at Bountiful noted that consumers “unfortunately” didn’t like Stress Comfort products, but their sales “skyrocketed the second we varied the pages.” and then continued to grow.
The company has also merged new zinc gummies with established products such as Nature’s Bounty Calcium Magnesium & Zinc Caplets and Nature’s Bounty Zinc 50mg Caplets – again, products with different formulations. He then repeated this process with vitamins and supplements in a number of categories, from brain focus tablets and elderberry capsules to vitamins and gummies and more. The brands involved included Nature’s Bounty and Sundown Kids.
Picture credits: Product screenshot on Amazon, via FTC complaint
The FTC cited and captured more than a dozen examples from 2020 and 2021 in its original lawsuit against the vitamin and supplement maker, which in 2021 sold its top brands — including Nature’s Bounty and Sundown — to Nestlé.
As a result of these product mergers, consumers who came across one of the newer products would believe that they are better received than they actually were, as they benefited from the merged ratings and reviews of other differentiated items.
“Improving your products by hijacking another product’s ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but it’s still false advertising,” said Samuel Levine, director of the Consumer Protection Bureau of the FTC last February when the consent order was first announced. its public comment period and its finalized version.
With today’s decision, Bountiful will have to pay the Commission $600,000 in monetary relief for consumers. It is also prohibited from making similar types of misrepresentations and using “deceptive review tactics that misrepresent what consumers think about its products or services,” the FTC said in a unanimous 4-0 decision.
Amazon itself has fought the fake review industry in several ways, including through lawsuits and permanent bans on brands for review fraud. But with The Bountiful Company, Amazon actually provided the functionality that allowed the retailer to commit fraud — and it apparently didn’t monitor its use. Given that Amazon has now entered the health market with its own online pharmacy and new telehealth service, its inattention to health-related fraud around devious vitamin and supplement reviews is even more concerning.
In response to a request for comment, an Amazon spokesperson shared the following:
“There is no place for fraud in the Amazon store. We have proactive measures in place to prevent SEO abuse and we constantly monitor our store. Our policies prohibit misuse of reviews, including offering incentives such as gift cards for writing positive reviews. We suspend, ban and take legal action against those who violate these policies and remove inauthentic reviews,” they said. “Amazon receives millions of reviews each week worldwide, which are analyzed before publication by our trained investigators and our advanced sophisticated tools. More than 99% of the products viewed by customers in our stores contain only genuine reviews. Amazon will continue to help law enforcement agencies hold bad actors accountable, including the FTC.
Updated 4/10/23, 3:57 PM ET with comment.
