The Amway scam is the first thing that comes to mind whenever someone is asked about networking these days. Previous judgments about the Amway scam aside, however, the real question is this. Is it really an Amway scam or a real business opportunity?
The truth is, Amway is one of the oldest network marketing companies, founded in 1959 by Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos in Ada, Michigan. It started as a small business selling a single cleaning product.
Amway Scam – The Good!
From such humble beginnings, Amway has achieved impressive levels of success, rapidly expanding to the point of currently over $8 billion in annual sales. Amway markets and distributes a variety of exceptionally high-quality consumer products, backed by a full money-back guarantee. A range that has now grown so much that I will not even try to list a part of the products.
Reported by Forbes as one of the largest private companies in the United States and ranked by Deloitte as one of the largest retail companies in the world. This positive publicity and praise should be more than enough to put to rest any claim of an Amway scam by even the harshest critics; however, we will soon discover that this is clearly not the case.
Amway Scam – The Bad!
The stigma of the Amway scam comes not from the strong company or its products, but from the income opportunity it provides. You see Amway market and sell its products through its independent business owners, or IBOs, as they are known. Unfortunately this is where things take a turn for the worse.
Like almost all other network marketing companies, Amway IBOs are strongly encouraged to write their friends and family list, also known as a hot list, before approaching them about joining the Amway opportunity or, at least buy some product. However, what happens then is that new IBOs find it extremely difficult to adjust to their warm market and fail to achieve any noteworthy success, becoming extremely disillusioned with the whole thing as a result.
Amway Scam – The Ugly!
Stories of this nature are extremely common, I would venture to say the norm given the high defection rates of network marketing. And for this reason alone, there are many very disgruntled former IBOs who claim to have been taken advantage of by the Amway scam. When in reality it was simply their warm market approach that was to blame and not Amway’s opportunity at all.
The simple, cold, hard, unavoidable truth of the matter is this. To be successful at Amway or any other network marketing company, it’s absolutely essential that you have a few more strategies up your sleeve than just introducing friends and family. As new IBOs very quickly exhaust their lukewarm market and are left with only two possibilities, they quit and then tell everyone about their experience with the Amway scam or start proposing to strangers.
