FTC Orders Supplement Maker To Pay $600K In First Case Involving Hijacked Amazon Reviews (techcrunch.com) 25
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has approved a final consent order in its first-ever enforcement action over a case involving "review hijacking," or when a marketer steals consumer reviews of another product to boost the sales of its own. TechCrunch reports: In this case, the FTC has ordered supplements retailer The Bountiful Company, the maker of Nature's Bounty vitamins and other brands, to pay $600,000 for deceiving customers on Amazon where it used a feature to merge the reviews of different products to make some appear to have better ratings and reviews than they otherwise would have had if marketed under their own listings. The case exposes how sellers have been exploiting an Amazon feature that allows sellers to request the creation of "variation" relationships between different products and SKUs. The feature is meant to help marketers and consumers alike as it creates a single detail page on Amazon.com that shows similar products that are different only in narrow, specific ways, the FTC explains -- like items that come in a different color, size, quantity or flavor. For instance, a t-shirt may have a dozen SKUs associated with one another because the shirt comes in a wide variety of colors.
For shoppers, it's helpful to see all the options on one page so you can pick the item that best matches your needs and budget. In the case of supplements, the feature could be used to combine the same products by merging various SKUs featuring different quantities of the item in question, like bottles with 50, 100 or 200 pills, for example. However, The Bountiful Company exploited Amazon's feature to merge its newer products with older, well-established products which had different formulations, the FTC said. The FTC cited and screenshotted more than a dozen examples from 2020 and 2021 in its original complaint (PDF) against the vitamin and supplement maker, which in 2021 sold its core brands -- including Nature's Bounty and Sundown -- to Nestle. As a result of these product merges, consumers who happened across any of the newer products would believe them to be better received than they were in reality, as they were benefiting from the merged ratings and reviews of other, differentiated items.
"Boosting your products by hijacking another product's ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but is still plain old false advertising," Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said this February when the consent order was first announced ahead of its public comment period and finalized version. With today's decision, Bountiful will have to pay the Commission $600,000 as monetary relief for consumers. It's also prohibited from making similar types of misrepresentations and barred from using "deceptive review tactics that distort what consumers think about its products or services," the FTC said in a unanimous 4-0 decision.
For shoppers, it's helpful to see all the options on one page so you can pick the item that best matches your needs and budget. In the case of supplements, the feature could be used to combine the same products by merging various SKUs featuring different quantities of the item in question, like bottles with 50, 100 or 200 pills, for example. However, The Bountiful Company exploited Amazon's feature to merge its newer products with older, well-established products which had different formulations, the FTC said. The FTC cited and screenshotted more than a dozen examples from 2020 and 2021 in its original complaint (PDF) against the vitamin and supplement maker, which in 2021 sold its core brands -- including Nature's Bounty and Sundown -- to Nestle. As a result of these product merges, consumers who happened across any of the newer products would believe them to be better received than they were in reality, as they were benefiting from the merged ratings and reviews of other, differentiated items.
"Boosting your products by hijacking another product's ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but is still plain old false advertising," Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said this February when the consent order was first announced ahead of its public comment period and finalized version. With today's decision, Bountiful will have to pay the Commission $600,000 as monetary relief for consumers. It's also prohibited from making similar types of misrepresentations and barred from using "deceptive review tactics that distort what consumers think about its products or services," the FTC said in a unanimous 4-0 decision.
Glad They Are The Only Ones Doing It (Score:2, Funny)
Now if only selling 'supplements' was a crime.
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If they are not dangerous, then what is going to stop people from getting expensive pee.
We buy crap all the time, be it some unhealthy food we crave, or alcoholic drink, or the need for a caffeine buzz. We know it isn't good for us, but it makes you feel better for a bit thus you spend money on it.
If someone gets a placebo effect for having a vitamin which their body cant use it and you pee it out in an hour, it is no worse than a cup of coffee.
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OK. I did.
Those 2 examples, tea and coffee, are consumed for enjoyment and for caffeine content. Very different. Try again.
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Step 1: Do not buy or ingest any supplements.
Step 2: No, actually there's no "step 2", it really is THAT FUCKING SIMPLE.
Note how this trick doesn't involve any form of forcing your own personal choice upon others.
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Some of them work well. B12 for energy, Saw Palmeto for prostate issues. Often they are not medically recognized simply because there is no profit in doing so. In fact it would take profit away from the expensive medications based on them that have been fully tested.
What we really need is a non-profit effort to sort out which ones work and which ones don't.
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What we really need is a non-profit effort to sort out which ones work and which ones don't.
Like this [nih.gov]? Or like this [nih.gov]? There are entities out there fighting the good fight.
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Re:We no longer live in a free country (Score:4, Insightful)
Free markets died with Corporations. Competition dies more with each merger and acquisition.
Devil's advocate here (Score:2)
Why are you conflating capitalism with a free market economy? FRAUD has no place in either.
Unless there is a market for fraud. Funny enough, economic theory is deafening silent about crimes in general, if you do not count banking. In "Wealth of Nations", the banking sector was lauded for printing unbacked money, because it created more money to do business with. Adam Smith recognized that it was the mainly poor who got paid in unbacked bills, so he suggested that there should be a law to make it illegal only for the small amounts that the poor would be able to get.
I don't think basic economic th
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Different formulation = false advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
That reminds me of the way Roku reused names like "Roku HD" on new models and continued to sell them under the same Amazon ASIN as the old model.
But what I want to know is, why is Amazon blameless in allowing such fraud to happen? Are they a vendor or just a marketplace? They seem to want to be whichever is most legally convenient at the time, thereby making a laughingstock of our legal system.
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This is an Amazon problem and will only be solved when Amazon is held accountable. I run into cases all the time where the reviews are of a completely different product. The vendor has changed the listed, or ,erred the listing. You do not know the ratings are bogus if you do not read the reviews.
This. There should be a human at Amazon in the loop every time someone changes the name of a product beyond a minimal edit distance, or changes a product category to an unrelated category and removes it from the original category. If you combine two products, they should be automatically split back apart if the new product's reviews differ by more than one standard deviation from the old product's reviews, and this should trigger an immediate review of all other products that the vendor has combined, with
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That reminds me of the way Roku reused names like "Roku HD" on new models and continued to sell them under the same Amazon ASIN as the old model.
But what I want to know is, why is Amazon blameless in allowing such fraud to happen? Are they a vendor or just a marketplace? They seem to want to be whichever is most legally convenient at the time, thereby making a laughingstock of our legal system.
Kind of like Facebook, eh? Except facebook is donating to all the right people, and censoring all the right people, so it's okay.
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Are they a vendor or just a marketplace? They seem to want to be whichever is most legally convenient at the time, thereby making a laughingstock of our legal system.
Corporate application of quantum theory.
Afaik that's not uncommon at Amazon (Score:2)
And I at times have to resort to choosing "Show me only reviews of ..." in the drop down box in order to see only the reviews for what I'm actually thinking of buying.
Heck, even with T-shirts, as some will use all cotton, different blends, and different weight/thickness.
P.S. Funny enough, a lot of supplement companies are located by me, right near an airport on Long Island. I need to remember the local outlet store, as they sell soon to expire (within a year or two) supplements for less than 10% of retail.
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Yeah, I remember when it was endemic to the site - I'd be looking at computer speakers, for example, and reading the reviews it was clear that they were for pool toys.
I reported quite a few, with no idea if it did any good, but haven't seen it lately(of course, I haven't been looking for electronics recently).
I'd also not buy any items done that way.
It also probably has something to do with the product category - supplements come under more stringent rules, even if they won some exceptions that make it easi
About time... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's good to see the United States government step in and solve a problem that's so hard, it would take Amazon an entire five minutes to solve if they wanted to.
If the government finds a particular Amazon seller guilty of violation of commerce laws, I hope they find a way to pin charges onto Amazon itself as the platform that facilitates violation of commerce laws.
Nestle is evil (Score:2)
This is an old game of theirs. I've seen it in real life: they changed the contents of an actual proper powdered milk brand they own to be mostly maltodextrin. They kept the packaging exactly the same. On its own, that isn't enough to say Nestle is evil. But they are one of those brands that I've never read or experienced anything good about. (To given them the benefit of doubt, do they sell anything healthy at a good value? How is their baby formula?)
Amazon feature is a crock (Score:2)
The Amazon feature involved is BS, because 99% of the time the different flavors of the product have nothing to do with each other. For example, you can have this disk drive in 4T, 8TB, 16TB. Now, all the reviews are together, but all have different technologies and production lines. Even for shirts: long sleeve vs short sleeve. Same reviews, but the long sleeves sleeves have a bug that doesn't affect the short sleeve. Yes, I have experienced that.
Putting the different flavors on the same page is fine
Farking bastages! (Score:2)