Omnilife is a multilevel marketing company that started in Mexico but operates throughout North, Central, and South America, selling hydration and nutrition products to a primarily Spanish-speaking customer base.
In the Hispanic world, it’s a major corporate power; until recently, it sponsored the fourth largest stadium in Mexico, and the CEO of the company owns a major Mexican professional soccer team.
So have I been involved? This explains everything:
The company has been around since 1991, and as a large, well-established company, it doesn’t look like it’s had any major swings in its popularity in the last decade or so, at least as measured by internet search engine traffic. Search volume has been essentially stable, albeit with a few sporadic and random ups and downs, for over ten years.
Depending on your perspective, this can be either a good thing or a bad thing for your business prospects.
On one hand, it means that the name brand is pretty well-established, so people are more likely to have heard of it. But on the other, it also means that the company isn’t really expanding much, so your odds of getting in on a big surge in popularity aren’t as good.
Products
Omnilife’s products fall, broadly speaking, into four categories: hydration, in-house supplement blends, weight loss supplements, and sports products.
The hydration products from Omnilife are all pre-mixed and bottled drinks. As far as MLM products go, they are pretty simple and straightforward.
Ego Life Pina, for example, contains only potassium and sodium salts (for electrolyte replenishment), sugar, and B-complex vitamins.
On the upside, there aren’t any strange extracts or herbs in the product, but it’s also hard to justify selling something that’s not substantively different from the kind of sports drink you could buy at any corner store.
Things get a little more interesting with the in-house supplement blends. These range from pretty basic stuff, like the C-Mas Citrus supplement, which is just vitamin C and citrus flavoring, to more complex blends, like their Kenyan drink, which contains a blend of choline, glycine, and B-complex vitamins.
This supplement drink is intended to help you focus better.
What’s the science behind it? The connection between choline and cognitive function is tenuous. One study, published in the journal Neuroscience and BioBehavioral Overviews, drew a connection between choline intake during pregnancy and cognitive function in offspring, but there haven’t been any studies showing a direct link between choline supplementation and better focus or thinking.
The link between glycine and brain functioning is essentially untested; it’s more likely that it’s included for taste and sweetness reasons than for any boost to cognitive functioning.
B vitamins, on the other hand, do seem to help cognitive function. According to a 2002 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, B vitamin levels could help account for up to 8% of the variation in cognitive function of elderly people: lower B vitamin levels mean worse cognitive function. So there is a plausible link between B vitamins and ability to focus.
In the weight loss department, Omnilife seems stuck in the ‘90s. Most of their popular weight loss supplements are spiffed up highly-caffeinated products, and the product names (Cafetino, Caffezino) make no effort to hide this. While this does work, it’s unimaginative and can be risky if you don’t know the total amount of caffeine you are taking in.
Caffeine does boost fat burning, due to its stimulant properties. A 2006 study in the scientific journal Obesity used some advanced statistical models on a large group of patients taking caffeine as part of their normal diet, and found that higher caffeine intake is associated with higher amounts of weight loss over the long-term, due to its metabolism-boosting effects.
Of course, the downside is that high caffeine consumption can cause jitters, irritability, and trigger withdrawal headaches when you stop using it.
As is too often the case with caffeinated MLM products, it’s not always easy to find out how much caffeine is in Omnilife’s weight loss products.
The sports performance products are similarly simplistic. There’s your usual protein powders (flavored and with added vitamins) and taurine-containing energy supplements, alongside Undu, a glucosamine supplement, but nothing creative or innovative.
Compensation plan
At $49, the membership kit you need to purchase to join Omnilife is pretty middle of the road in terms of cost. The compensation plan is unilevel, meaning you can build up your downline however you wish.
The minimum amount of product volume needed to quality for active status (and thus earn income) is 300 product volume per month, but this is a little misleading since Omnilife uses a much higher points to dollars ratio than most MLMs. It works out to about $110 per month in minimum sales to stay active, which is not too bad.
The retail discounts increase depending on how much sales you have; it starts at 20% and scales to 50% if you can exceed 4000 product volume per month.
To start earning downline commissions, you need one active distributor below you (duh). Once you’ve got this, though, you get 5% commissions on downline sales through your first level. To increase this rate and get deeper levels of commission, you need to up your monthly sales.
Recap
Omnilife is mediocre in pretty much every regard. When it comes to popularity, it isn’t great, but it isn’t terrible either.
Its products are fine; ranging from interesting to passable, and its compensation plan doesn’t raise any eyebrows, good or bad. In this kind of situation, it only makes sense to get into an MLM like this if you think you can tap into a potential market.
Given Omnilife’s appeal to Hispanics, that would be the obvious choice, but it also means your market is limited. It’d take a special kind of distributor to make this plan work.
Look, I’m definitely not an Omnilife hater, as I’ve shown throughout this review. But if you’re just doing it for the money, there are better ways to kill your day job.
You might like our coaching because it shows you the good life without peddling products to your family and friends.
http://bodynutrition.org/omnilife-review/ http://bodynutritionorg.tumblr.com/post/161947600929
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