Were you victimized by Melaleuca? Tell us about your experience.
You might have heard of a wellness product here or there, Melaleuca being one of them. Maybe you had a problem with their customer service or the fact that the company states they have a satisfaction guarantee or a money back guarantee and yet they didn’t honor it. Now you’re starting to wonder if they’re pyramid scheme. If so, you aren’t the only one.
Melaleuca is a wellness company. This company focuses on offering a line of wellness products, nutrients, supplements, and foods that help increase nutrition and reduce weight naturally. They also have home cleaning products that are considered non-toxic and are concentrated so they require less water to make. In total they have over 350 products they sell through their distributors. Vendors who sell products get commissions on those products and they get a bonus for recruiting other vendors, in addition to a commission on all products sold by the vendors they recruit.
Everyone who signs up has to buy a start up kit that costs $29 and that kit has sales materials they can use for demonstrations as well as motivational tips. The company claims that anyone can opt out of the additional $45 commitment but they are automatically signed up to buy a minimum of $45 worth of products from the company. It costs an additional $20 per year to work for the company.
They do make it clear how difficult it is to make money. They have 7% commissions on sales as well as 7% commissions on the sales made by vendors they recruit but the company does stipulate that those at the bottom rung of the pyramid make the least amount of money with 30,000 of their vendors averaging $1,750 per year in commissions. The majority of the money here seems to be made by those who recruit other vendors. They have multiple tiers that you can reach based on how many other vendors you recruit, some called senior directors, others called executive directors, and the top leaders called leading producers or presidential directors. They have only three presidential directors who received commissions over $1,000,000 in 2003, 2400 executive directors who received $186,000 annually in commissions as well as $1,000 per month from the company toward automobile costs.
A lot of the complaints you’ll find on the Better Business Bureau and Consumer Affairs have to do with a very difficult cancellation process. They stipulate that you have to do any canceling of orders for membership in writing with no exceptions and you have to do it by a specific time of the month in order to stop future automatic shipments so if you don’t do that, you might end up with a lot of unwanted inventory or charges.
This company has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau. They have been accredited for quite some time and they do have customer complaints but they managed those complaints pretty well. They have a relatively low order requirement and start-up fee which does border on a pyramid scheme but can be an attribute of an MLM company. There are a handful of legitimate MLMs that require minimum inventory purchases or minimum start-up fees.
The products are high-quality and they are a big part of the company. They do sell the products online and emphasize the environmental friendly nature of them whether you’re buying health care or home cleaning products and investing in high-quality products and making that the center of the business is typical of a legitimate MLM and not a pyramid scheme. That doesn’t mean they are a viable income source. They do have decent products though.
This doesn’t of course mean that they don’t have their issues or their customer complaints. If you have an issue with the company and you are struggling to get a response from customer service, get a cancellation approved, or receive that promise refund, you still have options including consumer arbitration. We can help.
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