Picking up zombie listings and being fined 600,000! The first big seller fined for abusing variants has appeared

Great news, friends. Today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued the first ever fine to Amazon sellers for abusing variants! Bountiful, a popular seller in the supplement category, was fined $600,000!

The FTC's public ruling stated that Bountiful "hijacked reviews" or merged reviews of other products to give its products an abnormally large number of high-scoring reviews. It even abused variant mergers to obtain labels such as #1best seller and Amazon's choice, further increasing the exposure of illegal products and misleading a large number of customers.

Bountiful's abuses were thoroughly exposed by the FTC, including the creation of a large number of relationships for supplement products with different formulas in 2020 and 2021, and the request to Amazon to merge some product reviews that did not belong to the seller in its contacts with Amazon. These communication emails and Bountiful's internal documents were used as evidence by the FTC, leaving the seller speechless.

The latest situation is that Bountiful has reached a settlement with the FTC, paying a $600,000 fine required by the FTC and prohibiting Bountiful from abusing variant relationships or using other fraudulent review strategies, otherwise it will face more severe penalties.

This is the first time in the history of the FTC and even Amazon that an actual fine has been imposed for abusing variant mergers to obtain reviews . In the past, when Amazon discovered this, it would only give a warning, and the worst case scenario would be store closure. Now that the FTC has intervened, it is not as simple as closing the store.

The FTC's move is also inseparable from Amazon's contribution. I have always emphasized to everyone that the official attitude towards picking up zombies is absolutely severe, second only to the kind of fake orders.

Amazon has previously taken advantage of multiple opportunities to remove a lot of products that abuse variants, and even developed an algorithm to catch them. The algorithm is so strict that sometimes even normal product mergers may be warned. There are also some products that have been merged for a long time, one or two years, and suddenly the system automatically separates them. These are all Amazon's efforts to rectify the operation of picking up zombies. Now that the FTC's supervision has been introduced, Amazon has exhausted all means to crack down on sellers who pick up zombies off the market.

Therefore, we should be cautious when using the zombie operation. And don’t think that Amazon can only crack down on some American sellers. We in China can only close the store and run away. In fact, Amazon has cooperated with domestic law enforcement agencies many times since last year to catch domestic illegal sellers.

Therefore, the compliance and refined operation of Amazon stores are the highlights that everyone should consider this year. Picking up zombies and the like can be slow. Amazon still has some white hat activities to increase reviews. For example, the free vine activity for new sellers just started some time ago. You can register a product in the Amazon Vine program for free and get up to 30 reviews. In addition, this incentive plan also has commission rebate rewards, up to 50,000 US dollars.

For more details on the specific incentive plan, please refer to my previous tweet below.