In these last few weeks I have been acutely aware of how lucky I am that I can work online and work from home and earn a good income. And for anyone who visits my site you’ll know that I love to research legitimate work from home opportunities and share them with my readers. There are plenty of excellent work from home opportunities available for everyone, and it really comes down to searching through the opportunities to weed out the scammy ones, and land on one or more that suit you, your lifestyle, your skills and your personality.
You’ve no doubt heard of Amway at some point or another. Now, with everything that is going on in the world, you might be more tempted than ever to try something new.
Read on and hopefully this post will help you make a decision about whether Amway might be right for you.
What Is Amway MLM and Should I Join?
In this Amway review we’ll find out if Amway is worth your time and effort. We will answer the question ‘is Amway a scam or legit’?
Amway is a multi level marketing (MLM) company.
In most MLMs, there are two main ways you can earn money:
- By selling a product that is not sold in retail stores. In order to obtain the product you must order through a consultant, or on a consultant’s website, and
- By receiving commissions from the sales of your downline (i.e. people you recruit into your network)
What this means is you need to able to sell products to people. If you genuinely want to be successful in a MLM company, you want to be recruiting new distributors who are also selling a lot of products. In the latter scenario, as well as selling products, you need to be able to sell the ‘lifestyle opportunity’ as well.
According to Amway, becoming an Amway Independent Business Owner means “More freedom. More flexibility. An Amway independent business offers you a path filled with possibilities, all on your terms. It’s a low-cost, low-risk way to start your own business regardless of your professional background, life experience or education. You supply the passion and hard work, we’ll provide the training, support, inspiration and rewards … be in business for yourself but not by yourself.”
Let’s take a look at Amway.
Some basic information about Amway:
- Website: https://www.amway.com
- Founded by: Jay Van Andel and Rich DeVos
- In operation since: 1959
- Price to join: Around $100
- Recommended: Yes, but only if you like MLMs and you’ve already got experience in direct marketing
My Amway review will take you through the following sections:
- What is Amway and how does Amway work?
- How do you get paid with Amway?
- Is Amway legit?
- My recommended way of making money online
What is Amway and how does Amway Work?
Amway manufacture and distribute nutrition, beauty, personal care and home products. Their products are exclusively sold in 100 countries through Amway Independent Business Owners (IBOs).
Their product line covers 4 main categories:
- Nutrition – vitamins and supplements, weight management, sports nutrition and energy drinks
- Beauty – skincare, makeup and fragrance
- Personal care – bath and body care, hair care and oral care
- Home – air treatment, cookware, dish, disinfectant cleaners, laundry, surface cleaners, water treatment
Amway invest in their product innovation, and they hold more than 800 patents. In the past seven years, $335m has been invested in new manufacturing and research and development facilities.
Something that does impress me with Amway is their 100% satisfaction guarantee and customer service program. They do appear to invest heavily in customer service, and that is a testament to their longevity in the market.
As an Amway IBO, you’ll have access to an app and digital resources to help you manage your business anytime or anywhere from a computer, smartphone or tablet.
- Amway Business Center app – helps you manage your business by letting you check personal and team performance, register new IBOs or customers, and view action reports.
- Amway Resource Center App – offers multimedia materials designed to help you access and share business resources on the go.
- Nutrilite Supplement Recommender – can suggest supplements suited to a person’s needs by taking a quick and simple assessment.
- The Amway Mobile website – can quickly and easily register a customer or an Amway IBO, check personal and team performance results, access educational resources, and shop.
If you do register as an IBO and pay the registration fee but then decide Amway isn’t for you, they say they will happily refund your money within 90 days of your registration. When it comes to MLMs, this is pretty much unheard-of, so this is an excellent sign of a quality company
The Amway Compensation Plan
With Amway, there are three different ways you can earn.
- Retail margin from every Amway product you sell.
- Bonuses calculated from your business growth.
- Incentives rewarded as you reach key milestones in your business.
Like other MLMs, I find their compensation plan a bit hard to wrap my head around. As Amway themselves say:
“Simply stated, the Amway Independent Business Owner Compensation Plan rewards you for selling products and services and for registering others as IBOs who do the same.”
Immediate Income
Firstly, you can earn immediate income which is calculated as the difference between the cost at which you purchase product from Amway or your sponsoring IBO, and the price at which you sell the products to your own customers. This income occurs immediately upon each sale to a customer. Amway publishes suggested retail prices for all products but you are not obliged to charge these prices.
Performance Bonus
You can also earn through the monthly Performance Bonus. The Performance Bonus is calculated by sales volume, which is tracked from two sets of numbers – Point Value (PV) and Business Volume (BV) – that are published in connection with each available product or service.
- PV is the number of points assigned to each product. The higher your PV total, the higher the percentage (up to 25%) used in calculating your bonus (see the Performance Bonus Schedule below).
- BV is a dollar figure assigned to each product.
Here’s how the performance bonus is calculated:
- If your Total Monthly PV is 7,500 or more, your Performance Bonus is 25% of your BV
- If your Total Monthly PV is 6,000–7,499, your Performance Bonus is 23% of your BV
- If your Total Monthly PV is 4,000–5,999, your Performance Bonus is 21% of your BV
- If your Total Monthly PV is 2,500–3,999, your Performance Bonus is 18% of your BV
- If your Total Monthly PV is 1,500–2,499, your Performance Bonus is 15% of your BV
- If your Total Monthly PV is 1,000–1,499, your Performance Bonus is 12% of your BV
- If your Total Monthly PV is 600–999, your Performance Bonus is 9% of your BV
- If your Total Monthly PV is 300–599, your Performance Bonus is 6% of your BV
- If your Total Monthly PV is 100–299, your Performance Bonus is 3% of your BV
For more information, here is the full compensation plan which I had to find buried in a link within a terms and conditions document.
Is Amway A Scam or Legit? It’s LEGIT! But…
MLM is a legitimate business model and Amway is no different. Whilst it isn’t for everyone, you can earn money. If the products are good and you like buying them anyway, then it might be a win-win for you. However, the way to make money, with all MLMs, is to sell as much product as possible for maximum income, and recruiting others to do the same.
Amway has an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau (BBB).
Amway certainly does have a very strong track record, and a long and successful history in the market.
IBOs are not required to purchase products themselves. Of course, you naturally may want to purchase some to either use yourself, or to have some on hand so that you can effectively demonstrate them, but there are no requirements.
So what’s with the ‘But …’ about? Well, honestly I’m just not a big fan of MLMs. I generally don’t like the model, and don’t like the focus on the recruitment of others in order to obtain commissions. I don’t like that people sell others the ‘lifestyle opportunity’ when they themselves have yet to realise that very lifestyle opportunity they are selling to others.
Whilst there are some pretty awesome aspects to Amway (and I can’t say that for other MLMs), you do need to read the fine print so that you can set yourself up with reasonable income expectations.
Amway confirm that the average monthly gross income for “active” IBOs was USD $207 in 2016. To be considered “active”, IBOs attempted to make a retail sale, or presented the Amway IBO Compensation Plan, or received bonus money, or attended an Amway or IBO meeting. If they were to be active every month for a whole year, they annualised gross income would be USD $2,484.
It must be noted that “Gross Income”means the amount received from retail sales, minus the cost of goods sold, plus monthly bonuses and cash incentives. It excludes all annual bonuses and cash incentives, and all non-cash awards. There may also be significant business expenses, mostly discretionary, that may be greater in relation to income in the first years of operation.
Only about 48% of IBOs in the U.S. were “active”. That means that less than half of the people that sign up and register to be an Amway IBO are actively generating income.
It’s important to know a few statistics about MLMs.
Jon Taylor PhD, in “The Case For (and Against) Multi-level Marketing” published by the FTC, researched MLMs and his research found:
- In the first year of operation, a minimum of 50% of representatives drop-out.
- After five years of operation, a minimum of 90% of representatives have left the company.
- By year 10, only those at or near the top have not dropped out – approximately 95% of representatives have dropped out by then.
Judging by that fact that only 48% of Amway IBOs are active, it is likely that Amway follows a similar pattern.
Many people who leave MLMs do so in favour of affiliate marketing.
My preferred way to make money from home is via the affiliate marketing model. The basic premise with affiliate marketing 
is that you:
- Choose an interest
- Build a website
- Attract visitors to your website
- Earn revenue when they make purchases from your site (via affiliate links)
Once you have built your own niche website and learnt how to attract visitors (using free methods), you can repeat this with as many of your own websites as you like.
You don’t need experience, and you don’t need to be technical.
You will be taught everything you need to know.
One of the best things about it – you don’t need to sell anything to your friends and family!
To learn how, just click here:
Have you had any experience with Amway or with other MLMs? What did you think?
If you have any comments or questions please leave them below, and I’m always happy to help you out.
As someone with extensive direct sales experience and success (not with Amway), I must say, you have done a great job of breaking down Amway for those even remotely interested. There is a ton of misinformation that floats around the internet on direct sales, Multi-Level Marketing so to see a good, honest review is refreshing. Keep up the good work.
I have worked with a couple of MLM companies in the likes of Forever Living Products (FLP), Alliance In Motion Global popularly known as AIM Global. I can say MLM marketing system is very difficult, the most annoying part of MLM system is that, you can be serious recruiting down lines and selling products, yet if your registered down lines do not do same, it’s going to results in cos 90.
Another thing is that, their products are very expensive especially in my part of the world (Africa). Telling somebody who is not sick to buy nutritional supplements for such high prices in Africa is not easy to come by.
I really love your organization of your review.