Amazon commits to CMA to tackle fake reviews

On 6 June 2025, the CMA announced that Amazon had agreed to undertakings in order to tackle fake and misleading reviews. The details of the undertakings are set out here. These undertakings were accepted in relation to the CMA's investigation initiated on 25 June 2021 under the previous consumer enforcement regime. Under the new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 enforcement regime which came into effect on 6 April 2025, the CMA can fine a company that infringes consumer protection law up to 10% of their global turnover.

The commitments set out that Amazon must address fake and misleading reviews on its UK online store, including biased reviews, those submitted in exchange for payment or incentive, reviews from fake or compromised accounts and the practice of “catalogue abuse” – being where sellers “hijack” the reviews of a well-performing product and add them to a different product to boost that product’s rating. Building on Amazon's existing processes, the commitments tackle these issues by requiring the implementation of several key measures. Amazon has committed to:

• put in place internal systems to detect and respond to fake and misleading reviews and catalogue abuse. Amazon is also to set thresholds at which it will determine that a review is suspicious, to then mitigate its impact (for example, by reducing its visibility or weight). Amazon must also regularly undertake risk assessments;
   
• set up clear and easy third-party reporting mechanisms; and
   
• enforce sanctions against sellers, suppliers and reviewers involved in fake and misleading reviews and catalogue abuse. Under the commitments, reviewers can be banned from selling on the platform and those who post fake reviews risk being banned from writing further reviews, and all their previous reviews being removed.

The Amazon commitments follow similar commitments from Google earlier this year. The CMA will continue to watch this space, having initiated a sweep of review platforms to assess compliance across the sector.