Amazon.com then and now: Its journey to build trust in ecommerce dietary supplements

The continued variability in the quality of products sold via e-commerce (Amazon) has become the talk of the town as of late. While it’s not a new subject, it has an interesting origin story full of learning experiences that many don’t fully know or understand.

Once upon a time, in 1995, a vice president at an investment firm named Jeff wanted to find a way to capitalize on the internet sales potential he envisioned. He had a revolutionary idea to change the way people shop, and he narrowed a list of 20 easy options like CDs and computer software down to books. Simply go on a newish thing called “the internet,” search for a book, patiently wait for a week or two and it would arrive at your doorstep.

Launched from his garage, Jeff called it Amazon.com because he envisioned the choices of books would match the diversity of the Amazon jungle, supposedly. Prior to this idea, consumers’ only options were those hard to find and small, amazing smelling mom-and-pop bookstores (oh how I love that smell), and of course, the 700-pound gorilla of its time, Barnes & Noble (remember the brilliance of this bookstore chain for placing a Starbucks right inside?). Not long after that, in 1998, Jeff had an even better idea, which was to take his online book-selling platform and start selling everything else under the sun.

Related:Independent testing program reveals subpar quality of dietary supplements sold on Amazon

Before Jeff’s fantastic new idea, consumers who wanted to buy a dietary supplement would head over to their local health food store and talk to a knowledgeable member of the staff. A wide variety of health food and vitamin stores supported our industry’s early slow growth. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) helped to professionalize our industry by requiring manufacturers to document their process in meeting quality standards, ensure labels claims were accurate-ish, and bar drug and disease claims. Still, I’d describe the quality of the products sold as “diverse.” As a result, the phrase “Wild West” was colloquially used to describe our industry.

In 2007, after a 13-year wait from when DSHEA was signed into law, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gifted the cGMPs (current Good Manufacturing Practices) to us, and we finally had a clearer legal path toward higher quality and effective products. By that time, many brands had begun to sell their products on their own websites. This dramatically improved access to supplements for those who weren’t fortunate to live near a Mrs. Gooch’s or Fruitful Yield or Mother’s Market or Bread & Circus.

Related:Amazon dominates dietary supplement market in wake of Covid-19

Coming in hot was Amazon.com. Jeff made shopping for dietary supplements even more convenient and with deliveries fast enough to not bother leaving your home. Incidentally, his platform also made it easy for new brands to join the industry without actually joining the industry. Prior to that, the supplement buyers at health food stores were the gatekeepers to the industry and perpetuated legacy brands with quality they trusted to populate the store shelves.

Cheaters cheat, and here is where things started to go south. While Jeff was wildly successful at providing a platform with the diversity of the Amazon jungle, he forgot one thing: the gates of quality. In the early days of Amazon.com, policies to ensure the quality of a product were either nonexistent or less than effective. One could develop a product, launch a store on Amazon and sell pure garbage, or even worse, products with harmful ingredients.

Having snow skied only twice (because I suck at it), I am familiar with the phrase, “getting out over your skis.” This is where Amazon was: out over its skis. In retrospect, it seems the company didn’t realize the sort of poor-quality genie it had let out of the bottle. What Amazon did realize is the enormous profit potential it created as more and more vendors began selling supplements online.

Related:Supplement brands, Amazon and FDA weigh in on counterfeit products

Blinded by profit, Amazon missed some extremely important early steps to prevent a massive infection of poor-quality products. The charlatans realized the gates of quality on Amazon’s platform were not just wide open but nonexistent. Very quickly, these quacks flooded the platform with substandard products with outrageous label claims that no serious brand playing in our industry would make and, for the final blow, sold them at incomparably low prices.

Returning to legacy supplement brands, Amazon simply wasn’t a fair playing field, especially for those who don’t like cheating and felt the consumer deserved a good product. Meanwhile, consumers had no idea they shouldn’t trust all the brands, and for many, price was the deciding factor since they assumed the supplements were quality products.

The legacy brands began to take notice when their market share eroded. They complained and even launched their own sting operations to call out the bad brands. The good players in our industry shared data on the terrible quality failings with both Amazon and FDA (which historically has a suspiciously lackadaisical tendency to let us nearly destroy ourselves).

Amazon started to make the news in a way that has the potential to destroy what Jeff built, or at least embarrass his company. FDA made it pretty clear that it doesn’t consider supplements made by little-known brands sold online that are not meeting label claims a priority because these products aren’t harming people. I have to ask, though: Isn’t a heart patient whose cardiologist recommended CoQ10 (Coenzyme Q10) facing a health risk when the product they buy on Amazon contains little or none of the substance?

Suddenly, around 2021, Amazon showed up to our (the industry trade associations’) table. The company attended our board meetings and was even invited on stage at our conferences to begin to fix the mess that it had made. It seemed like Amazon’s representatives were really interested in righting this wrong, and they actively engaged many people and companies in addition to the trade association leaders.

Being a social butterfly and a self-proclaimed gatekeeper of quality to the industry, I became close with (and still am because she’s a lovely human) one of Amazon’s first industry liaisons in her relatively short time in that role. She and I talked a lot while Amazon was first looking for a solution to their quality / PR problem, and at one point I shared five profound words I thought would help resolve the quality problems: test, test, test, test, test. Just make vendors test the products before they are sold on the platform and require them to submit the test results to Amazon as proof of quality.

Not long after that, Amazon rapidly deployed a new testing requirement — and the problem was on its way to being solved. Easy, right? Unfortunately, that proved to be more complicated given the diversity of products sold on Amazon and that many labs simply suck or lacked the expertise to test those products. More important, Amazon had no experience as a gatekeeper in this industry. Amazon’s industry liaison asked me, “How do I know what a good lab is and what is not?” To which I replied, “Simple, make them use ISO 17025 accredited labs.”

Not long after that, Amazon rapidly deployed a new testing requirement that labs had to be ISO 17025 accredited. Easy, right? Well, that proved to be more of a challenge since not all labs are created equal and some aren’t ready to commit to ISO 17025 accreditation because it’s a lot of work and expensive. I recall the industry flipping out about this new requirement more than the prior one — much to my astonishment.

Not long after that, Amazon ditched the ISO 17025 requirement, because as it turns out, being an ISO-accredited lab that can test all the plants and fungi is pretty exceptional, and it simply wasn’t sustainable for the volume of finished products being sold on the platform. What did stick was the requirement to use one of a handful of Amazon-approved labs and to submit test results for approval before being allowed to be sold.

Not long after that, the team that Amazon had developed and deployed to review all the certificates of analysis (CoAs) quickly became overwhelmed with a combination of fraudulent documentation from unknown labs and testing that was not fit for purpose. They could not gatekeep their platform from an analytical standpoint because of the sheer volume and complexity of products being sold. They just didn’t have the staff and expertise and decided not to commit to developing that resource.

Then, an entity jumped in with an idea on how to save the day. Amazon was advised to adopt a new plan that, in my opinion, is a disappointing, lousy subcontracting job that will cost the industry millions of unnecessary dollars while lining the pockets of a few big testing, inspection and certification (TIC) organizations, while potentially destroying the few remaining small labs. Sounds good, right? Actually, it’s quite bad and disappointing that this terrible and expensive plan originated from so-called industry proponents.

Today, it is clear that Amazon is still trying to fix quality problems but it’s complicated because those darn profits are so good that to do what is necessary (immediately take the bad players down) would not be in the best interest of the shareholders. Like pumping the brakes on an important product recall to slow the negative financial impacts of cutting sales by 75%, this slow drip fix is not winning the trust of the industry — and soon consumers will start to smell the stink.

Thanks to Amazon, I really enjoy how fast I can order and receive a special arm sleeve heart rate monitor that I can wear while I get beat up at jiu-jitsu. But I still don’t buy or recommend that anyone else buy supplements from Amazon other than those from an established brand.

While this commentary may sound like I think Amazon.com is evil, I absolutely do not. It’s true that I have been disappointed in its efforts to institute gatekeeping requirements. I feel Amazon has not sought sufficient industry input and taken time to establish a program that will protect consumers without undermining the smaller players in the industry, some of whom play an important role in innovation and integrity.

Still, I remain optimistic that Amazon will eventually get it right.