Herbal Life as a Home Based Business

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am contemplateing getting into a home based business, Herbal Life is the name of the company, I am wondering , are there any mambers who have either been in or are now selling Hebal life products, at any level, who will share their expierience with me. I am not lookling for the pratfalls of trying to run a home based business. I am aware of the adage , when something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. I am looking for the “straight dope.,” as it were. I also am interested in hearing from members who have actually used the product.
Please pardon any grammatical or spelling errors I may have made.

                                                         NadaHappyCamper
2

Herbalife is a Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scam. The only ones who make any money in the business are doing so by selling startup kits to suckers. http://www.cockeyed.com/workfromhome/epilogue/unsuccessful/unsuccessful2005.html Try Googling Herbalife (that’s the way it’s spelled, and you’ll find a lot of Herbalife distributors, and a whole lot of unhappy ex-distributors and customers.

3

Yes, I have known people that have done it. It is a scam although I am sure that people up the chain make money. You won’t make any money or probably not much. If you do make any money, they frame it so that it sounds like a lot even though it is well below minimum wage when everything is considered. Your friends, relatives, and casual acquaintances will hate you of course in person and then add additional things behind your back.

4

The thing is that they make it sound like tons of people will just be itching to buy your junk and tons more will be eager to join up to sell the junk to others. It’s just not so. You’d do better with something like Tupperware or Avon or one of the companies that doesn’t force you to take monthly packages of stuff and sign others up.

5

I know some people who have made money selling it.

The key is, you do need to have the personality for sales. Are you aggressive? Are you unafraid to tell a fat person “lose weight now, ask me how”? Then maybe you’d be OK selling. But if you’re not that type, you won’t make a cent.

6

I came in here just to post that URL. Rob Cockerham has done a lot of amateur detective work on his own time, in digging up info on this and other consumer advocacy issues. His website is freaking brilliant.

7

I would like to thank the members for their insightful replies,and the links that were posted certainly are worth reading for anyone else that may be contemplating the same idea.

                               NadaHappyCamper

Please forgive any grammatical or spelling errors.

8

As a practical matter, many of your casual acquantiances may become confused because it sounds so much like “Gerbil Life”.

9

Avoid any MLM company that requires you to sign others up as representatives of the company in order for you to make any money. Meaning, don’t go for Amway, Excell, Melaluca, Herbalife, Mary Kay, etc. If they push heavily for you to “show your friends and family this great opportunity” run away as fast as you can. Most of these companies have “product” for you to sell to people, but if you watch the number magic when they pitch the company to you, they will make outstanding claims of wealth and most of those big fat numbers will be based on you and your friends finding other suckers to sign up underneath you.

If you find a company that lets you sell product, they can be good to work with. Pampered Chef, Avon, Partylite, among dozens and dozens of others from craft supplies to clothing to food to home decor. Google “direct sales” and you’ll find the names of them. Then google more until you get some good references for the company. Most of them you will never make an income that equals going out and working 9 to 5 in a cubicle, but it’s good suplimental income or SAHParent income. Most of them work with the home party model. You need to be good in sales, able to make people want your product without being pushy. I would consider a company like this if I was any good at sales and had a good circle of friends who could help me get started.

I’ve been burned by two large MLM companies and I can only be greatful we only lost a couple of hundred each time and we never put crap on our credit card for it. Never again will I be that stupid.

10

IIRC, Herbalife has kind of a shady past. The founder spent time in prison connected with meth manufacturing and, when, he got out, proceeded to do essentially the same thing legally with ephedra.

11

Also avoid any that establish geographic “non-competition” regions. My wife got into one MLM (largely so that she could buy the products at dealer prices rather than customer prices, and not necessarily to make more money), only to later discover that the sellers were fiercely territorial.

Those higher up on the MLM chain didn’t care whether there were too many sellers in any given region, it was just up to the sellers to figure out whose toes they were stepping on. After all, it’s in the upper-ups’ best interests to overstuff the market, which earns more money for them. Territory data was not easy to discover, either. The kicker was, that the seller ran the risk of having to pay fines, or even losing their license to sell stuff, if the corporate HQ got complaints that the seller was in someone else’s territory or even selling to another seller’s customer, even if the customer willingly changed sellers.

My wife also couldn’t sell over the internet, and we had to be extra careful what information was (or, specifically, wasn’t) included in her website, for fear that HQ would find basis to accuse her of wrongful advertisement. (Example: you couldn’t use the company logo, or the company name, in any of the websites, even if you give full attributation. We broke that rule, but haven’t been called on it yet. Even if you want to give more sales-oriented information, like party times or contact info, it had to be protected with a password that only our current customers had. We broke that rule too. Yeah, like we’re really going to be inclined to follow rules set down by a group of ethically-challenged and greedy Utah soccer moms. Bite us, MLM overlords!)

My wife still has her license to sell, but it’s strictly so that she can buy materials that she wants to. As soon as her spending drops below the lower limits, they’ll likely drop her like a hot potato. After all, the only reason the MLM exists is to funnel the seller’s money upwards.

Make no mistake, the terms the MLMs use are quite often stacked well in favor of the corporation, at the expense of their sellers.

12

My stepmonster was in Amway. Another way they got money out of her was to sell her motivational tapes. This was 25+ years ago and she was paying about $5.00 for cassette tapes. She must have had several hundred of these.