FTC Fines Bountiful Company for Hijacking Amazon Reviews
The Federal Trade Commission has fined Bountiful Company, the maker of Nature’s Bounty vitamins, for hijacking Amazon’s reviews.
Bountiful Company abused a feature on Amazon’s website that is designed to let companies showcase small variations of the same product, such as when a company makes a product in several different colors.
The supplement-maker abused the feature, using it to promote newer products by piggybacking them on older, established, and well-reviewed ones. This essentially gave newer products more credit than they may have deserved, tricking consumers into buying them.
“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.”
The final consent order was approved 4-0, marking the first time the FTC has tackled “review hijacking.”
