Supplement Maker Charged with Hijacking Amazon Ratings
The Federal Trade Commission today filed its first "review hijacking" case, accusing The Bountiful Company of deceiving consumers by appropriating reviews and ratings from other products.
Bountiful carried out its deception by merging its new supplement products on Amazon with different well-established products that had more ratings, reviews, and badges, the FTC said.
Among the badges diverted to new uses were “#1 Best Seller” and “Amazon’s Choice” badges.
“Boosting your products by hijacking another product’s ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but is still plain old false advertising,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The Bountiful Company is paying back $600,000 for manipulating product pages and deceiving consumers.”
Bountiful, based in Bohemia, New York, manufactures vitamin, mineral, and other nutritional supplements. Its brands include Nature’s Bounty and Sundown. Bountiful sells its supplements to Amazon, which then sells them to consumers on Amazon.com.
"Variation relationships"
According to the FTC, Bountiful took advantage of an Amazon feature that allows vendors to create or request the creation of “variation” relationships between some products that are similar but differ only in narrow, specific ways – such as color, size, quantity, or flavor.
Products with a variation relationship share the same product detail page on Amazon.com and appear as alternative choices, so shoppers can compare and choose among similar products.
The product detail page of products that are in a variation relationship displays the total number of ratings, the average star rating, and the reviews for all of the products in the variation relationship, the FTC said in its complaint. They also share any “#1 Best Seller” or “Amazon’s Choice” badges.
According to the FTC’s complaint, during 2020 and 2021, Bountiful asked Amazon to create numerous variation relationships for its supplement products with different formulations. According to one internal Bountiful communication, the company created variations with some new products “to try and ramp them faster as 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 best seller badge which worked.”
For example, in March 2020, 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. “Unfortunately people d[id] not love the [Stress Comfort] product[s],” but sales “spiked the second we variated [sic] the pages and they continue to grow,” according to one internal company email.
The FTC’s complaint alleges that by manipulating product pages, Bountiful misrepresented the reviews, the number of Amazon reviews and the average star ratings of some products, and that some of them were number one best sellers or had earned an Amazon Choice badge.
In addition to requiring that Bountiful pay $600,000 as monetary relief for consumers, the proposed order prohibits Bountiful from making similar types of misrepresentations and bars the company from creating a variation relationship – or using other deceptive review tactics – that distort what consumers think about its products or services.