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In January, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settled a complaint against Fashion Nova alleging that the fashion retailer blocked negative reviews from appearing on its website. Now FTC lawyer Amber Lee says she hopes the case sends a message to any other companies that may be tempted to engage in similar conduct.
Lee served as lead attorney on the historic case, which marked the first time the FTC has challenged a company for allegedly failing to post negative reviews.
“There always has to be a first case,” Lee tells TIME of how the complaint against the fast fashion giant came about. “And this is the first time we’ve uncovered evidence of this sort of review suppression.”
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While the agency has previously sued companies like Sunday Riley Modern Skincare, a brand that sells skin cream and treatments at Sephora, for allegedly deceiving customers with fake reviews, Lee says that review suppression is a different story.
“Review suppression is more withholding or hiding certain categories of reviews—in this case, negative reviews or lower-starred reviews—whereas fake reviews are when either employees or some other party are paid to leave a review for a product when they haven’t had that experience with the product,” she says.
In its complaint, the FTC claimed that Fashion Nova used a third-party product review system that automatically posted four- and five-star reviews to its site but held lower-starred reviews for the company’s approval. From late 2015 until November 2019, Fashion Nova never approved or posted hundreds of thousands of lower-starred reviews, the complaint said. Fashion Nova will be required to pay $4.2 million to settle the allegations and is barred from misrepresenting customer reviews or other endorsements.
In a statement emailed to TIME, a Fashion Nova spokesperson contended that the FTC allegations were “inaccurate and deceptive” and that the company was “highly confident that it would have won in court and…
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Source : time
