The US Federal Trade Commission approved the final approval order in its first-ever enforcement action over a case involving “review hijacking,” or when a marketer steals consumers’ opinions about another product to boost its sales. In this case, the Federal Trade Commission required The Bountiful Company, maker of Nature’s Bounty vitamins and other brands, to pay $600,000 to deceive customers on Amazon as it used a feature to merge reviews of different products to make some of them appear to have ratings and reviews. Better than if they were marketed under their own listing.
The case reveals how sellers exploited Amazon’s feature that allows sellers to request the creation of “variety” relationships between different products and SKUs. The feature is meant to help marketers and consumers alike because it creates a single detail page on Amazon.com that shows similar products that differ only in narrow, specific ways, the FTC states — such as items that come in a different color, size, quantity, or flavor. For example, a T-shirt may have dozens of SKUs linked together because the T-shirt comes in a wide variety of colors. For shoppers, it helps 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 can be used to combine the same products by combining different SKUs that contain different amounts of the ingredient in question, such as bottles of 50, 100, or 200 pills, for example.
However, The Bountiful Company took advantage of Amazon to combine its newer products with older, well-established products of different formulations, the FTC said.
In one example, a retailer asked Amazon to combine newer supplements such as 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 Tablets Sleep, and Nature’s Bounty Valerian Root Capsules.
Not only did the older products have different formulations than the newer ones, they also had different formulations from one another. In an internal company as of August 2020, the company reported that the nearly 1,000 reviews and an average 4.5-star rating were the newer products due to this variance relationship. Before the merge, Stress Comfort had 26 reviews and only 3.2 stars. In the email, Bountiful’s director of e-commerce noted that consumers “unfortunately” didn’t like the Stress Comfort products, but that their sales “upped the second we changed pages” and then continued to grow.
The company has also combined the latest zinc gummies with well-established products such as Nature’s Bounty Calcium Magnesium & Zinc Capsules and Nature’s Bounty Zinc 50 mg – again, products with different formulations. Then repeat this process with vitamins and supplements across a number of categories from brain focus tablets to elderberry capsules to vitamins, gummies and more. Participating brands included Nature’s Bounty and Sundown Kids.
Image credits: Product screenshot on Amazon, via Federal Trade Commission complaint
The FTC cited more than a dozen examples from 2020 and 2021 and took screenshots of them in its original complaint against the vitamin and nutritional supplement maker, which in 2021 sold its core brands — including Nature’s Bounty and Sundown — to Nestlé.
As a result of these product mergers, consumers who came across any of the newer products believed they were receiving a better reception than they actually were, as they were benefiting from the merged ratings and reviews of other distinct items.
“Promoting your products by stealing another product’s ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic,” Samuel Levin, director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Office of Consumer Protection, said last February, when the approval order was announced, “but it’s still false advertising.” old.” From the public comment period and final version.
With today’s decision, Bountiful will have to pay the Commission $600,000 in cash relief to consumers. It is also prohibited from making similar types of misrepresentations and prohibited from using “deceptive review techniques that distort consumers’ opinion of its products or services,” the FTC said in a 4-0 unanimous decision.
Amazon itself has been fighting the fake review industry in a number of ways, including through lawsuits and permanently banning review scam brands. But with The Bountiful Company, Amazon actually introduced the feature that allowed the retailer to commit fraud — and apparently didn’t monitor its use. With Amazon now entering the healthcare market with its own online pharmacy and new telehealth service, its lack of concern for health-related fraud about hijacked vitamin and supplement reviews is troubling.
Amazon was unable to immediately provide a comment but we will update if a comment is returned.