By Shane Shifflett, Alexandra Berzon and Dana Mattioli
Americans searching for last-minute Christmas gifts on
Amazon.com will get lots of results that include "Amazon's Choice"
products. Many shoppers will assume that is a dependable stamp of
approval.
It isn't.
Amazon attaches the badge to countless legitimate listings, but
also to products regulators have raised safety concerns about, that
make false claims or whose listings appear to have been manipulated
by sellers to get the endorsement.
Amazon sometimes gives the badge to items that violate its own
policies. One is the energy supplement Redline Microburst, which
calls itself a "fat burner" and which last week carried an Amazon's
Choice designation, even though Amazon rules explicitly prohibited
sales of Redline-brand products.
Amazon has awarded the badges in recent months to a
sexual-enhancement drink the Food and Drug Administration said
contained Viagra, which is a prescription-only medication, and to
five cellphone chargers claiming Apple Inc. certification that
weren't certified brands.
Amazon discloses little about the mechanics behind its Choice
badge. Algorithms make most of the decisions, some former Amazon
executives said. An Amazon executive in a September letter to U.S.
senators said it uses "tools, including algorithms." An Amazon
spokeswoman declined to comment on the algorithms, saying the
company considers product popularity, availability, customer
reviews, pricing and other factors.
Sellers say they covet the badge because it can boost sales. For
merchants marketing low-price knockoffs and illicit products, it
offers a sheen of quality.
The spokeswoman said Amazon doesn't tolerate policy violations
such as fake reviews, counterfeits and unsafe products, and will
remove Amazon's Choice badges for products "that may not meet our
high bar." Amazon said it reviewed and addressed the problematic
items identified by The Wall Street Journal. It updated or removed
some of them.
Amazon's website had listed Redline among prohibited brands of
dietary supplements. After the Journal began inquiring about the
Redline products' Choice status, Amazon updated its list of
prohibited products to include only specific Redline-branded
supplements. Microburst is no longer among the banned items.
An Amazon's Choice badge appeared in October on another Redline
product, Xtreme, which the label said contained N-methyltyramine.
The FDA includes that substance in an advisory list of ingredients
it says it is still studying but has determined may not be legal to
put in dietary supplements based on a preliminary evaluation. The
Xtreme listing with the Amazon's Choice badge was taken down after
the Journal pointed it out to Amazon. There were Xtreme listings
without the badge on Amazon on Sunday.
Jack Owoc, chief executive of Redline-products maker Vital
Pharmaceuticals Inc., based in Florida, said the company is
removing the questionable ingredient from future products, which
are sold on Amazon only by other merchants.
To get a better picture of what gets the Amazon's Choice badge,
the Journal between August and December looked at 54,400 listings
that included top listings from among 10 of Amazon's most-popular
categories -- clothing, electronics and supplements among them --
as well as results of spot checks that searched for brand names and
prohibited items.
Of those, 27,100 proved to be Amazon's Choice items, most with
four-star-or-better ratings. The label appeared even more often for
products such as supplements in the sports-nutrition category: 84%
of about 1,000 listings with four-star-or-better ratings earned the
badge.
Among findings from the 27,100 Amazon's Choice listings:
* The badge favored Amazon's own products. The AmazonBasics
brand had the most Amazon's Choice badges, 540, of any brand
identified by the Journal.
* The Journal identified dozens of products that fail to meet
safety standards, banned items, and listings falsely claiming
official safety certification. A children's musical instrument
claiming FDA approval was Amazon's Choice for customers searching
for "noisy toys for 2 year old," although the FDA doesn't approve
toys.
* Amazon's Choice items came up when using some search terms for
controlled substances such as steroids and marijuana products. A
search for "psilocybin," a hallucinogenic illegal in the U.S.,
offered "smart shrooms" with the badge.
* Nearly 1,600 listings showed signs of being manipulated by
sellers attempting to obtain the badges -- appearing to have
tricked Amazon's algorithm by promoting keywords that were highly
specific, were misspelled to capture customers' mistyping or
contained brand names of other items.
Amazon launched Choice in 2015 so customers could shop through
voice-activated devices such as its Amazon Echo speaker, which at
the time didn't have a screen for buyers to see listings.
The company chose "Choice" because it thought it wouldn't imply
as much backing as "Amazon Recommends," said a former executive
involved in the decision, adding: "We chose it carefully to try to
signal that this is a great product, but this is not something that
we endorse."
Amazon developed an algorithm to determine its Choice
assignments based on specific keywords. A customer could state
"toothpaste," say, and the speaker could add the Amazon's Choice
result to the shopping cart.
Amazon's Choice status is valuable to sellers because it can
quickly garner a 25% bump or more in sales, said Brandon Young, a
Florida-based Amazon seller who said he sells toys and other
products and who teaches classes on Amazon selling. Many merchants
pore over Amazon's sales and search data to figure out how to game
the Choice status, say Amazon sellers and consultants who advise
them.
"Amazon's Choice is just free advertising," said Ilia Belov, a
dietary supplement-seller based in Austin, Texas.
A big reason "Amazon's Choice" gets onto problem products is
that an industry of sellers, consultants and software developers
has sprung up to help game the algorithm, say sellers and
consultants.
In one tactic, sellers send links in social-media messages to
consumers urging them to click and make a purchase, sometimes
offering reimbursements. Those links are associated with keywords
that aim to trick Amazon's algorithm into thinking the product is
more popular than it is and can help result in an Amazon's Choice
badge, sellers and consultants say.
Some sellers urge consumers to post high ratings, a factor in
the badge math. The Journal ordered HempBri capsules, whose labels
say they contain "hemp extract" and another supplement sometimes
used to treat arthritis. The Amazon's Choice product arrived with a
card directing the buyer to a Facebook chat bot that asked if the
buyer liked it. After the Journal replied affirmatively, the bot
offered to put money in the buyer's PayPal account if the buyer
wrote a review.
The Amazon spokeswoman said the company is "relentless in our
efforts to protect the integrity of reviews" and has prevented
millions of attempts to leave inauthentic reviews. She didn't
address questions about the HempBri capsules, which were still
listed as Amazon's Choice on Sunday.
The capsules were one of 10 listings -- among the 27,100
Amazon's Choice products -- that implied they had an ingredient not
allowed by Amazon or that used information that could mislead
customers into thinking they included such ingredients, such as
photos of marijuana plants or marketing testimonials that mentioned
the banned ingredient. These products are listed for as much as
$100 an ounce with promises to alleviate pain, anxiety and stress
-- claims and price points often associated with cannabidiol, or
CBD, which is banned by Amazon. The more-common hempseed oil often
sells for under $1 an ounce.
"It's a shame because consumers just don't know how to tell the
difference between these products," said Erica Stark, executive
director of the National Hemp Association. The Journal couldn't
identify the company behind HempBri.
Amber Naturalz, a Tooele, Utah, pet-products maker, this summer
learned that a counterfeit of one of its herbal supplements had the
Amazon's Choice badge. Terri Sutherland, an employee at the
company, said the fake's seller undercut the legitimate listing's
price, driving orders to the illicit seller -- which, she
speculates, helped get the badge.
Ms. Sutherland ordered the fake and enlisted a chemist to test
it. The ingredients, she said, were completely different from the
authentic product's.
The counterfeit was removed from the site after she notified
Amazon.
"My concern," she said, "was people buying things on Amazon that
can be ingested and it isn't the right product."
Write to Shane Shifflett at Shane.Shifflett@wsj.com, Alexandra
Berzon at alexandra.berzon@wsj.com and Dana Mattioli at
dana.mattioli@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 22, 2019 12:34 ET (17:34 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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