The U.S. Federal Commerce Fee has permitted a last consent order in its first-ever enforcement motion over a case involving “evaluate hijacking,” or when a marketer steals shopper evaluations of one other product to spice up the gross sales of its personal. On this case, the FTC has ordered dietary supplements retailer The Bountiful Firm, the maker of Nature’s Bounty nutritional vitamins and different manufacturers, to pay $600,000 for deceiving prospects on Amazon the place it used a function to merge the evaluations of various merchandise to make some seem to have higher rankings and evaluations than they in any other case would have had if marketed underneath their very own listings.
The case exposes how sellers have been exploiting an Amazon function that enables sellers to request the creation of “variation” relationships between totally different merchandise and SKUs. The function is supposed to assist entrepreneurs and customers alike because it creates a single element web page on Amazon.com that reveals related merchandise which are totally different solely in slim, particular methods, the FTC explains — like objects that are available in a unique shade, measurement, amount or taste. As an example, a t-shirt might have a dozen SKUs related to each other as a result of the shirt is available in all kinds of colours. For buyers, it’s useful to see all of the choices on one web page so you possibly can decide the merchandise that finest matches your wants and funds. Within the case of dietary supplements, the function may very well be used to mix the identical merchandise by merging numerous SKUs that includes totally different portions of the merchandise in query, like bottles with 50, 100 or 200 capsules, for instance.
Nevertheless, The Bountiful Firm exploited Amazon’s function to merge its newer merchandise with older, well-established merchandise which had totally different formulations, the FTC mentioned.
In a single instance, the retailer requested Amazon to merge newer dietary supplements like Nature’s Bounty Stress Consolation Temper Booster and Nature’s Bounty Stress Consolation Peace of Thoughts Stress Aid Gummies with three different merchandise: Nature’s Bounty Nervousness & Stress Aid Ashwagandha KSM-66 tablets, Nature’s Bounty Botanical Sleep tablets and Nature’s Bounty Valerian Root capsules.
Not solely did the older merchandise have totally different formulations from the newer ones, however in addition they had totally different formulations from each other. In an inside firm from August 2020, the corporate even acknowledged that the roughly 1,000 rankings and 4.5-star common rankings the newer merchandise had had been due to this variation relationship. Earlier than the merge, Stress Consolation had solely 26 evaluations and three.2 stars. Within the e-mail, an e-commerce director at Bountiful famous that customers “sadly” hadn’t cherished the Stress Consolation merchandise, however their gross sales had “spiked the second we variated the pages” after which continued to develop.
The corporate additionally merged newer Zinc Gummies with established merchandise like Nature’s Bounty Calcium Magnesium & Zinc caplets and Nature’s Bounty Zinc 50 mg caplets — once more, merchandise with totally different formulations. It then repeated this course of with nutritional vitamins and dietary supplements throughout quite a few classes, from mind focus tablets to elderberry softgels to nutritional vitamins and gummies and extra. Manufacturers concerned included Nature’s Bounty and Sunset Children.
Picture Credit: Screenshot of product on Amazon, by way of FTC grievance
The FTC cited and screenshotted greater than a dozen examples from 2020 and 2021 in its unique grievance in opposition to the vitamin and complement maker, which in 2021 bought its core manufacturers — together with Nature’s Bounty and Sunset — to Nestlé.
Because of these product merges, customers who occurred throughout any of the newer merchandise would imagine them to be higher acquired than they had been in actuality, as they had been benefiting from the merged rankings and evaluations of different, differentiated objects.
“Boosting your merchandise by hijacking one other product’s rankings or evaluations is a comparatively new tactic, however remains to be plain outdated false promoting,” Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Shopper Safety, mentioned this February when the consent order was first introduced forward of its public remark interval and finalized model.
With right this moment’s determination, Bountiful should pay the Fee $600,000 as financial reduction for customers. It’s additionally prohibited from making related varieties of misrepresentations and barred from utilizing “misleading evaluate ways that distort what customers take into consideration its services or products,” the FTC mentioned in a unanimous 4-0 determination.
Amazon itself has been preventing the pretend evaluate {industry} in quite a few methods, together with via lawsuits and completely banning manufacturers for evaluate fraud. However with The Bountiful Firm, Amazon truly offered the function that allowed the retailer to commit fraud — and it seemingly didn’t police its use. On condition that Amazon has now entered the healthcare market with its personal on-line pharmacy and its new telehealth service, its inattention to health-related fraud round hijacked vitamin and complement evaluations is much more regarding.
In response to a request for remark, an Amazon spokesperson shared the next:
“There’s no place for fraud in Amazon’s retailer. Now we have proactive measures in place to forestall itemizing abuse and we constantly monitor our retailer. Our insurance policies prohibit evaluations abuse together with providing incentives like reward playing cards to write down constructive evaluations. We droop, ban, and take authorized motion in opposition to those that violate these insurance policies and take away inauthentic evaluations,” they mentioned. “Amazon receives thousands and thousands of evaluations each week globally, that are analyzed earlier than publication by our expert investigators and complicated industry-leading instruments. Greater than 99% of merchandise seen by prospects in our shops include solely genuine evaluations. Amazon will proceed to help enforcement businesses in holding dangerous actors accountable, together with the FTC.”
Up to date, 4/10/23, 3:57 pm ET with remark.
