Statistics and earnings

What is Network 21, scam or legitimate business? How much money can you earn in Amway? How does it work, really? What does the average person earn? The answer to these questions does not matter when you know the answer to the question: how likely are you to earn anything?

My favourite question to ask at a seminar is: how many people earned nothing or made a loss?
If they don't give you a straight answer walk away.

Amway is notorious for being deceitful and misrepresenting their figures and true earning potential for customers (IBOs). The Federal Trade Commission ordered Amway to stop retail price fixing and allocating customers among distributors and prohibited the company from misrepresenting the amount of profit, earnings or sales its distributors are likely to achieve with the business. Amway is required to accompany any such statements (if they do not, please notify the FTC or other such governing body) with the real averages per IBO / distributor, and should be easily available on their internet website.
They have been fined for breaching these terms before.

The fact is over 99% of people lose money in all MLM schemes.


Even by only supplying the average earnings, this is deceiving, as 1 high earner can raise the average of many other people making a loss. Given the resemblance to a pyramid type structure of the Network 21 and Amway business, it is a fact that ONLY mostly the people at the top make any money. This rule applies to any earnings claims from any top MLM company, including Usana Vitamins, Avon, Herbalife etc.

The nature of multilevel marketing schemes is that those towards the top of the pyramid (whose income is derived substantially from the sales efforts of several or perhaps many levels of IBOs below them) sell motivational courses and literature to people like you for their own profit (this is how they make the big bucks), directed at people in the lower levels of the pyramid, in the guise of support aimed at encouraging them to recruit more members and thus to extend further the base of the pyramid. Such material is known as Business Support Material (or "BSM"), which is what Network 21 provides, others call it the "tool scam".

Also the official earnings statistics figures they supply often also only state "active" members, further skewing the figures in their favour. If you were losing money in a business, how long would you continue to stay an active paying member? You would not, that would be stupid...but then again, you are talking about weird Amway people, where the make believe is possible. The fact is the number of non-active members is massive, people leave Amway all the time for good reason; because they are losing money.
Unfortunately the official figures given do not show the huge amount of people who are not considered active, or those who leave. If they did, the average earnings would be much worse than those publicly known, as shown below.

So now we know the "average" earnings is definitely not what most people earn, quite the opposite.

On top of this, the companies have been examined in court for their deceiving behaviour, and independent studies have been conducted. One by the Consumer Awareness Institute (based on Amway's own reports) stating that 99.99% of Amway IBOs lose money, also dont forget about all your expenses, let alone all that wasted time. That is, only 1 in 10,000 people in Amway make a single cent or dollar of money!

Now for an example. Consider how many people you see at the front of the stage at a Network Twentyone seminar conference who claim to be making 60,000 a month!
If you use the above figure of 1 in ten thousand make a profit, this means the average earnings are more like $6, as the average earnings are split over everyone.
For one person to earn a lot of money, many more make zero, or many people lose money.

Either way 9,999 people will lose money for just 1 to make more than 1 cent! Think about that.

If someone representing their company, or trying to seduce you to join claims how much money you can possibly earn, don't be fooled and suckered in by their wild claims, use your brain to clearly think about how they might be playing with the statistics. Instead invest in something where everyone makes money, not where everyone loses money.