When I was an Amway IBO, I often found myself buying more goods than I needed because a single person simply has no practical use for 100 PV worth of Amway goods on a consistent month to month basis, save for eating double x for breakfast lunch and dinner or something like that. In general, Amway's prices are higher than many retailers, because the cost of the IBO bonus is built into the price of their goods. Probably more than 30% additional markup is needed for Amway to cover all of the IBO bonuses paid to layers upon layers of upline and downline.
Because of this "disadvantage" that IBOs have, it is a very rare IBO that is able to sell enough goods to make a retail sales income. There's some documentation that Amway sells only about 4% of their goods IBOs (Http://mlmtheamericandreammadenightmare.blogspot.com/2012/03/chairman-and-ceo-of-amway-have.html). This supports my claim about the prices. Because of this disadvantage, the only other way an IBO can build PV volume is to sponsor downline who will hopefully consume their 100 PV or more. You basically can't build a sustainable and profitable Amway business without downline.But sponsoring new downline is a big problem. Most IBOs are unable to sponsor others. This is where many IBOs have become their own worst enemy. I was once tricked into attending an Amway meeting, and many others have left comments on blogs and forums expressing the same experiences. Others were outright lied to about the business or were deceived. These practices, while not employed by all IBOs, have saturated North America. It is hard to find someone in the US who has not experienced or knew of someone who had a bad experience with an Amway IBO. Because of how some groups operate, there are also allegations of cult-like behavior, and some groups greatly exaggerate the amount of upfront cash needed to register. I understand that signing up to be an IBO can be less than $100 but some groups charge $200 or more, and I saw a prospect who said a network 21 group charged over $600 to register in Amway.
You add in all these factors such as high prices and a spotty reputation and it's easy to see why IBOs cannot move volume and cannot sponsor downline. New IBOs are almost assured of this fate when they register. It is only a rare few who can overcome these major handicaps. And even those who "make it" are often unable to retain their levels for very long. Is this truly a way to generate "residual" income? I think not.
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What's really laughable is how Amway defenders speak of MLM as "the wave of the future" that will force the closing of all brick-and-mortar stores. They also try to link this idea with the growth of on-line purchasing, as if buying from catalogs that you can read on your computer screen had anything at all to do with MLM.
The entire structure of an MLM like Amway is so complicated and intricate and needlessly convoluted that it makes you laugh. Down-lines and up-lines and PV and BV and recruitment and meetings and tools and functions... good God, it's endless! Buying and selling stuff this way is like growing your own wheat to make bread. Add to this the fact that Amway products are grossly overpriced to satisfy the long chain of suppliers who must be paid off, and the absurdity of it all becomes crystal-clear.
The thing that made me realize what a fraud Amway was happened when I asked up-line for pointers on how to sell Amway products to the general public. He said "The best way to sell Amway products is to show the Amway plan!" That's when I finally saw that the whole thing was insane. Does Nabisco sell cookies by convincing customers to become Nabisco dealers?
If Amway was a wave of the future, why didn't they absolutely explode during covid 19? Amazon sure did as an online retailer. We know why.
I'm sure that the wallets of the high pins in the AMOs exploded because their organizations didn't have to front the money to rent hotels ballrooms every week or conference centers quarterly. Meanwhile, they still charged for weekly Zoom meetings and quarterly Zoom conferences as normal. No overhead makes the "leaders" very, very happy.
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