The Federal Commerce Fee has filed costs in opposition to the Bountiful Firm, which manufactures dietary supplements beneath the model names Nature’s Bounty and Sunset, for so-called “review-hijacking.” Picture courtesy of Federal Commerce Fee
Feb. 16 (UPI) — For the primary time, the Federal Commerce Fee has filed costs in opposition to an organization for so-called “assessment hijacking.”
The FTC grievance, filed Thursday, alleges that the Bountiful complement firm manipulated product critiques on Amazon.
“Bountiful carried out this misleading tactic by merging its new merchandise on Amazon with totally different well-established merchandise that had extra rankings, critiques,” the FTC mentioned in a press launch Thursday.
Bountiful manufactures nutritional vitamins and dietary dietary supplements beneath the Nature’s Bounty and Sunset model names.
The grievance alleges that Bountiful abused an Amazon function that permits merchandise to be displayed in “variation” relationships, the place related merchandise with minor variations share critiques. By requesting variations for his or her newer merchandise, Bountiful took benefit of merchandise that had already acquired critiques, giving the impression that the brand new merchandise have been well-rated.
“Boosting your merchandise by hijacking one other product’s rankings or critiques is a comparatively new tactic, however remains to be plain previous false promoting,” mentioned Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Client Safety, Samuel Levine.
“The Bountiful Firm is paying again $600,000 for manipulating product pages and deceiving clients,” Levine mentioned.
An inner e mail from Bountiful said the corporate created variations for merchandise “to attempt to ramp them sooner as they have been NOT promoting and we wished to offer them a little bit enhance.”
