Go look at a beauty product you almost bought on Amazon this spring.
Check the review count. Then check the review count you remember.
For a lot of listings, those two numbers no longer match — and not because anyone deleted anything. Between February 12 and May 31 of this year, Amazon quietly rolled out a change to how reviews are shared across product variations. Ratings that had been pooled together got split apart.
Nothing happened to the products. Nothing happened to the customers. The only thing that changed is that the number on the page is now, roughly, about the thing you’re looking at.
Which raises the obvious question about what it was about before.
The Trick, Explained in One Paragraph
On Amazon, products can be linked as “variations” of each other — the classic use is a t-shirt in six colours. Same shirt, different colour, one page, one pile of reviews. Totally reasonable.
Here’s the part nobody tells you: the variation page displays the combined star rating and combined review count for everything in the group. So if you link a brand-new product to an old established one, the new product inherits the old one’s reviews. On day one. Before a single human being has ever bought it.
A serum launched last Tuesday can show up with four years of five-star reviews attached, and nothing on the page tells you which reviews belong to which product.
That’s it. That’s the whole trick. It’s not hacking. It’s a checkbox.
They Wrote It Down
Normally this is where a piece like this says “brands would never admit to this.” Except one did, in writing, and the FTC published it.
In 2023 the FTC brought its first-ever review hijacking case against The Bountiful Company — the supplement maker behind Nature’s Bounty. During 2020 and 2021, Bountiful asked Amazon to create variation relationships between brand-new supplements and established products with different formulations. Not different flavours. Different products.
An internal communication, quoted by the FTC, explained the reasoning. They created the variations, in their own words:
“…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].”
They weren’t selling. So they borrowed someone else’s reviews.
Bountiful paid $600,000 to settle. The FTC’s Samuel Levine put it about as plainly as a regulator ever does: “Boosting your products by hijacking another product’s ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but is still plain old false advertising.”
One case. One company that got caught and wrote it down. The tactic itself required no special access — every seller on the platform had the same checkbox.
Why Your Category, Specifically
Amazon’s own rollout notes give the game away on where the problem lives.
Supplements and nutraceuticals are, by the platform’s own account, ground zero for this — the category where sellers most routinely grouped different formulas, different dosages, different ingredient blends and different delivery mechanisms under one parent listing and one shared pile of stars.
Sit with the logic of that for a second. In a t-shirt, the variation is the colour, and the reviews transfer honestly because the thing being reviewed — the shirt — is identical. In a supplement, the formula is the product. There is nothing else. A different formula isn’t a variation of anything. It’s a different product wearing the same page.
Hair, skin, and wellness sit in exactly this zone. Gummies, powders, serums, “advanced” versions, “2.0” reformulations, the same brand’s twelve slightly different bottles. If you have ever clicked into a hair supplement with 4,000 reviews and thought well, 4,000 people can’t be wrong — you may not have been reading about that supplement.
What Amazon Actually Changed
Starting February 12 this year, rolling category by category through May 31, reviews are now only shared between variations with minor differences that don’t affect functionality.
Read that phrasing closely, because it’s an admission. It’s Amazon conceding that reviews were previously being shared between variations with differences that did affect functionality. That’s not a clarification. That’s a correction.
Amazon says the update targets specific transfer tactics — discontinued listing merges, Vine review aggregation, artificial review pooling — rather than legitimate variations. Sellers who kept pooling structures in place to hoard reviews can now be actioned for review manipulation under catalog abuse.
Good. Genuinely. It’s the right change.
It’s also worth naming what it means: the star ratings you used to make purchasing decisions between roughly 2019 and this spring were, in an unknown but non-trivial number of cases, describing products you weren’t buying. Nobody is going to send you an apology. The number just quietly got smaller and everyone moved on.
How to Read a Listing Now
The change helps. It doesn’t finish the job. Some things worth doing:
- Open the variation dropdown. If a “variation” is a different formula, different active, or different delivery format — not a size or a scent — treat the shared reviews as noise. Ask what’s actually being reviewed.
- Compare the review dates to the launch. A product marketed as new with a dense cluster of reviews from three years ago is telling on itself. This is the single fastest check and it takes nine seconds.
- Read the three-star reviews, not the five. Three-star reviewers are the only people on the internet with nothing to gain. They’re also the ones most likely to say “this is not the same as the old formula,” which is how you find a merge from the inside.
- Search the reviews for the wrong product. Literally use the review search bar. If you’re looking at a serum and the reviews mention capsules, you’ve found it.
- Ignore the aggregate. The single number under the title is the most manipulated pixel on the page, and it always has been. It’s a summary of a pile whose contents you cannot see.
The Bottom Line
The uncomfortable thing here isn’t that a supplement company got fined. It’s the structure that made it worth doing.
That four-digit review count did real work on you. It ended the research. It’s the thing that made you stop reading and start buying, because 4,000 people had apparently already done your homework. It was the closest thing to social proof the internet had left.
And for a stretch of years, in a category built on products nobody can independently verify — you can’t see your own follicles, you can’t measure your own density, you’re taking everyone’s word for everything — that number could be borrowed from a product that wasn’t the one in your cart.
Amazon fixed the checkbox. It hasn’t fixed the habit.
Next time a number does your thinking for you, check whose number it is.
Sources: Federal Trade Commission — FTC Takes Action Against Bountiful Company for Deceptive “Review Hijacking” (ftc.gov, 2023); Amazon Seller Central — product reviews and variation policy updates (2026).
