Amazon is facing complaints about sponsored ads after parents accused the retail giant of placing items onto baby gift registries without people's knowledge.
It happened to Brian Parsons, 32, a soon-to-be dad from California.
"It was really confusing when we got this gift because we didn't ask for it," Parsons told "Good Morning America." "My wife didn't want it. I didn't want it. And once we figured out a friend had paid money for something that none of us wanted and tried to do something nice for us, then we got really annoyed."
When you're shopping on registries this holiday season, keep an eye out for sponsored @amazon items within the gift list. @rebeccajarvis tells us why this new feature is leaving some customers confused and frustrated. https://t.co/W1vUNMab63 pic.twitter.com/6E5TDL7nDr
— Good Morning America (@GMA) November 30, 2018
Another parent, Kima Nieves, 28, told The Wall Street Journal that she received two Aveeno bath-time sets and a box of Huggies diapers through her Amazon baby registry but did not register for them.
“Very sneaky,” Nieves of Fredericksburg, Virginia, said. "That’s friends’ and family’s money going somewhere we didn’t approve of."
For more than a year, Amazon has been automatically including as many as three sponsored products on baby registries.
"With the baby registry ads, Amazon was unique," said Wall Street Journal technology reporter Rolfe Winkler, who originally reported on the Amazon baby registry backlash. "We did look at Target, looked at Buy Buy Baby ... and for them you open a baby registry and they were blank. For Amazon, with this program, you open a baby registry and there were items in their shopping cart for people looking for your registry."
The unwanted items appear the same as other items on the registry, only they're saved under a small, hard-to-read tag that says, "sponsored."
Amazon told "GMA" in a statement: "We're constantly experimenting with new ways to improve the shopping experiences for customers. These sponsored listings are currently being phased out."
Amazon also said the sponsored content will no longer be added to newly-created registries. In addition, the unwanted items are subject to the same return policy as all Amazon products.
