U.S. Federal Trade Commission Fines Supplements Retailer $600K For 'Review Hijacking' on Amazon
U.S. Federal Trade Commission Fines Supplements Retailer $600K For 'Review Hijacking' on Amazon
In the first case of its kind a final consent order has been granted by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against supplements retailer The Bountiful Company for 'review hijacking'.
A review hijacking is when a marketer steals or repurposes a review of another product to promote their own.
The case against Bountiful marked the FTC's first law enforcement challenging 'review hijacking'.
In addition to penalising Bountiful $600,000, the final order prohibits Bountiful from making similar types of misrepresentations and bars the company from using deceptive review tactics that distort what consumers think about its products or services.
According to the FTC, The Bountiful Company abused a feature of Amazon.com to deceive consumers into thinking that its newly introduced supplements had more product ratings and reviews, higher average ratings, and 'No.1 Best Seller' and 'Amazon's Choice' badges.
In its complaint, the FTC claimed that Bountiful had misrepresented the ratings, reviews, and number of Amazon reviews of some products on Amazon.com, and that some of these products were number one seller(s) or had earned the Amazon Choice badge after manipulating product pages on Amazon.com.
The company began selling two new products: Nature's Bounty Stress Comfort Mood Booster and Nature's Bounty Stress Comfort Peace of Mind Stress Relief Gummies. It requested that Amazon combine the new products in a variation relationship with three of its established products, all with different formulations.
The retailer had taken advantage of the Amazon feature which allows vendors to create or request the creation of 'variation' relationships between some products that are similar in many ways but differ in narrow, specific ways - for example, their colour, size, quantity, or flavour - by creating a page on Amazon's marketplace.
The Director of FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, Samuel Levine said, “Boosting your products by hijacking another product's ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but is still plain old false advertising.”
