Market America Unfranchise Business – Compensation Plan Review

This article will provide a quick overview of Market America, but will focus on some of the details of the compensation plan. Market America calls its business opportunity “No Franchise.” Why? Because Market America offers the solid benefits of a franchise, like training and systemized methods, but without the traditional headaches, like overhead and startup costs, insurance, employees, and many other aspects of franchising. Market America is a product brokerage company that prides itself on personalized marketing and mass customization. The company’s headquarters are in Greensboro, North Carolina, and it was started by James Ridinger, a former Amway representative.

The products

As mentioned before, Market America is a product brokerage company, which means that it doesn’t actually produce any products, but instead surveys customers, finds out what they want, and then finds a manufacturer to produce the desired product. This allows Market America to only market products that are selling well to its representatives and can screen out underperforming products, making the company much less vulnerable to market swings. The manufacturer then researches and produces the product, while Market America focuses on getting the product to the consumer through its network of independent distributors, also known as “Non-Franchise Owners.” Today there are hundreds of products in the “mall without walls” from unique nutrition, skin care and makeup products, weight loss products, an anti-aging hormonal line and many more. In addition to their exclusive product lines, they also have thousands of affiliate partners that allow preferred customers of “Non-Franchise Owners” to shop and shop online through a web portal. Familiar names like Wal-mart, Target, Best Buy and many more are stores that allow reps to get paid when their customers shop online.

The commercial structure and payment

Market America has what they call a binomial compensation plan. These are some of the payment plan details. Each representative or “non-franchise owner” retails products to preferred customers and recruits other representatives to do the same. The benefit of this is of course the leveraged time and financial gain. A Non-Franchise Owner begins by purchasing 200 BV of product to “qualify” their business center and remains at a “transfer purchase” of 50 BV-150 BV per month. This is a product that the representative can purchase for personal use or to sell to customers. BV is a point value assigned to each product that is used to determine when commission checks will be earned (average BV is 80% per dollar of product, so $100 would be 80 BV). After that, the representative must recruit two people and place one on the left side and one on the right side. This “activates” the business center and the “Non-Deductible Owner” can start receiving commission checks. As your business organization grows and more reps sell to preferred customers and recruit new “Non-Franchise Owners”, the amount of BV accumulated on each side results in commission payments.

Here’s a bit more detail on how compensation works. To “qualify” your non-franchise business center you must, as stated above, purchase 200-300 BV worth of products for personal use and sale to customers. This initial purchase will cost an average of $400-$1000. Financial leverage benefits are included for “qualifying” with 300 BV or more instead of just 200 BV because the non-franchise owner can start with 3 business centers instead of just one. Once “qualified”, you need to stay on a monthly “transfer buy” purchase of 50-150 BV, depending on how far along you are in the comp plan, which equates to $100-$300. Again, this is a product for your personal use and to sell to your customers, so you need to sell a large quantity of the product to make a profit every month.

Now that you are “qualified”, your next goal is to “activate”. This is done by “rating” one rep on your left side and one on your right side. To do this, your sponsor will teach you how to introduce the product and business to people they know might be interested in starting their own business. When you “activate” your business center with your two reps, you can collect commission checks based on the amount of BV produced in both legs.

This is an example of how the residual compensation plan works and how you will be paid. Once “active”, each leg begins to accumulate BV. Once the BV in each leg reaches 1,200, you are issued a check for $300. This continues to accumulate 2400BV in each leg and another $300 check is released. Then 3600BV in each leg for another $300 check. The last leg is 5000BV each leg for a $600 check. Therefore, the total payout for accumulating a cycle of 5,000BV in each leg is $1,500. The cycle is then reset to zero on each side and performed again. This process, of course, slows down as you start business, but it starts to speed up as new reps come into your organization and start selling to your customers. This process continues to speed up until you cycle through the entire 5,000 BV in one week, which means you make $1,500 per week or $78,000 per year. There are also weekly bonuses for helping people in your organization succeed, which can bring your annual income to $109,000. You can open as many centers as you want, which means that once you maximize the earning potential of one center, you can open another one and start earning commissions.

In conclusion…

Market America’s “No Franchise” is not a scam. It is a legitimate business opportunity that provides a large selection of market driven products for the representative to choose from to sell. But like any business, networking or not, it takes serious commitment, continuous action, and learning new things you may not be familiar with when it comes to starting a new business. It also takes time to build the system and it is not a get-rich-quick scheme, but it can provide significant income over a period of 2-3 years if you focus on following your systemized business plan. Market America may or may not be right for you from a business standpoint, but either way, I would encourage you to check out the quality products they offer at http://www.marketamerica.com/deigenfeld.