The Federal Trade Commission has imposed It is the first fine against a company for “review hijacking” on Amazon, or the act of repurposing reviews from another product to mislead users. The Bountiful Company, which makes Nature’s Bounty vitamins and other supplements, is accused of artificially inflating the number of reviews and ratings its products received on Amazon.
The agency claims that Bountiful abused Amazon’s variations feature, which allows sellers to merge products into a single listing when they offer different colors, sizes, or quantities of the same item. Since these product variations share the same listing, this also means they share the same Amazon-applied reviews and labels, such as the “#1 Best Seller” or “Amazon’s Choice” badges.
Bountiful allegedly took advantage of this setup by bundling its new products into the same list as the established ones, all under the guise that they were simply “variations” of products when in fact they were completely different from each other. According to the FTC, this was to help “boost” sales of Bountiful’s newer, less successful supplements, by tricking users into thinking that the ratings for their most popular items applied to their newest ones as well.
In one (of many) examples cited by the FTC, Bountiful added two new products to its Amazon store in March 2021: Nature’s Bounty Brain Superfood Capsules and Nature’s Bounty Brain Focus Chewable Tablets. The company then allegedly added these products as a variation of its more established Nature’s Bounty Ginkgo Biloba 120mg capsule listing, all three of which the FTC said had different ingredient compositions. In another example, Bountiful combined their Immune 24 Hour + Softgels with their highly rated Nature’s Bounty Vitamin C 500mg Tablets, which, again, have different formulas.
Bountiful allegedly continued to abuse Amazon’s variations system with various of its products throughout 2020 and 2021. with the initial FTC complaint quoting a former Bountiful employee as saying that this method helped “bring up” newer products faster since “they were NOT selling and we wanted to give them a little boost in R[atings]&R[eviews] to gain visibility and allow them to also borrow the ‘Amazon Choice’ badge and the best seller badge that worked.”
In addition to fining Bountiful $600,000, the FTC also ordered the company to stop making similar representations in the future and using “deceptive review tactics” to mislead customers. Amazon has long had a problem with fake reviews flooding the platform, something the e-commerce giant has tried to crack down on over the years. However, “review hijacking” appears to be another issue Amazon will have to deal with in order to keep products on its site in check.
“There is no room for fraud in the Amazon store,” says Amazon spokeswoman Christy Distefano in a statement emailed to the edge. “We have proactive measures in place to prevent listing abuse and continually monitor our store. Our policies prohibit review abuse, including offering incentives such as gift cards for writing positive reviews. We suspend, ban, and prosecute those who violate these policies and remove inauthentic reviews.”