The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a final consent order against The Bountiful Company for allegedly manipulating Amazon's product pages and deceiving consumers.
The FTC said that the company used a feature of Amazon.com to deceive customers into believing that its newly introduced supplements had more product ratings and reviews, higher average ratings, and "Amazon's Choice" and "Best Seller" badges.
Alleged Amazon Review Manipulation
The FTC filed the complaint in February 2023, accusing Bountiful of misrepresenting the number of Amazon reviews, average star ratings, and reviews of some of its products.
It further stated that Bountiful also misinformed customers that some of its products were number-one bestsellers or had earned an Amazon Choice badge.
The FTC's action is its first law enforcement case against "review hijacking," a fraudulent practice in which a marketer steals or repurposes reviews of another product.
The final settlement order from the Commission prohibits Bountiful from engaging in similar misrepresentations or utilizing deceptive review practices that alter consumers' impressions of its goods or services, as well as requiring the company to pay $600,000 as monetary relief for consumers.
Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a press release, "Boosting your products by hijacking another product's ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but is still plain old false advertising. The Bountiful Company is paying back $600,000 for manipulating product pages and deceiving consumers."
The Bohemia, New York-based company Bountiful produces dietary supplements under the Nature's Bounty and Sundown brands. The business supplies Amazon with its goods, which the company then resells to customers on Amazon.com.
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Amazon Tool
According to the FTC, Bountiful used a tool on Amazon that enables sellers to establish or request "variation" relationships between similar goods that vary only in specifics like color, size, number, or flavor.
The same product information page is shared by items with variant relationships on Amazon.com, enabling customers to compare and select related products.
FTC's complaint notes that Bountiful requested Amazon to set up several variation partnerships for its supplement items with various formulations in 2020 and 2021.
One internal Bountiful communication claims that the business produced variants of certain new goods "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 also to borrow the 'amazon choice' badge and best seller badge which worked."
On March 28, 2023, the Commission voted to approve the final consent order by a 4-0. The Bountiful case was handled by staff attorneys in the FTC's Advertising Practices Section.
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