The seller was fined 4.1 million just because the new link "shared" the old link review

  Faced with this situation, sellers have come up with various strategies. One very effective method is to create a variation link to bind the new link to the old link.

In this way, the new link can share the reviews, rankings, star ratings and other ratings of the old link, and can even be directly selected as the best seller.

However, some sellers recently received high fines for this behavior.

It is understood that the seller's behavior was called "review hijacking" by the US Federal Trade Commission, which required him to pay a fine of up to US$600,000 to the government, equivalent to about RMB 4.1 million.

According to the FTC, the merchant took advantage of an Amazon feature that allows sellers to create or request the creation of “variation” relationships between some products, such as different colors, sizes, quantities or flavors of a product.

The FTC explains that products with a "variation" relationship can share product detail pages on the Amazon platform. In addition, products with a variation relationship can display the total number of ratings, average star rating, and reviews for all products. In addition, they can also share logos such as #1 Best Seller or Amazon's Choice.

Faced with a high fine, the seller complained that the Federal Trade Commission should punish more egregious business practices rather than his workarounds within the rules.

The FTC quoted the seller discussing the practice in a blog post about the case: “An employee from the company said in an email that by creating a ‘variant’ relationship between a new product and an old product, the new product can ‘borrow’ the old product’s Best Seller logo, ratings and reviews, as well as the homepage position that only Best Seller products can have. ”

Based on the above information, the Federal Trade Commission ultimately determined that the seller's practices had violated relevant laws and regulations on fair trade and decided to impose a fine.

In fact, this kind of practice is not uncommon in the cross-border circle. Many sellers have tried to quickly bring up new links by creating variants.

However, it remains unknown whether the U.S. Federal Trade Commission will increase its review of related cases in the future, so sellers are advised to keep a low profile in the near future.

Amazon

Seller

fine