Why Herbalife Doesn't Work - Selling Herbalife

Introduction | Work from Home page 1 2 3 | Small Business | Trying Anything to Sell page 1 2 | Universal Distributor Saturation | Active Ingredient? | Summary

An environmentally-conscious method of selling Herbalife in Sacramento, or anywhere, is to post a website on the internet.  You can set up a website where customers anywhere in the world can go and buy pills and shake-mix from you. 

The internet is an interesting place to sell things, and although I enjoy the internet as a powerful source of information, I don't recommend buying a website to sell the Herbalife pills or "distributorships".  The reason is simple; there is too much competition for such a small market.

Here are a few websites I found that sell herbalife diet products:

http://www.inches2lose.net
http://herbalinks.com
http://www.itsahealthylife.com/
http://www.herbals4less.com/
http://www.justherbalife.com
http://www.herbaldiscountclub.com

In fact, try searching Google for herbalife.  I got about 210,000 results. That's more than I got on a search for Monica Lewinski. That's not a community, that's competition.

There are hundreds of Herbalife websites already online, so why is anyone going to buy Herbalife products from you? Price? Selection? Free Shipping? Speed? Location? Service? On the internet, Consumers aren't looking into your shop to see if it is clean, and they don't care if you are in a bad neighborhood.  What they care most about is price. 

You'll notice that only one of the above sites have the word "herbalife" in the URL, that is partially because of rule 23 of the herbalife internet, mail order and lead generation regulations:  Distributors may not use the name “Herbalife” or any of its trademarks, trade names, or product names in their domain name (URL) which could create confusion with the Company.

I'll bet they were anxious about having 1,349 domains registered with "herbalife" in the URL.

The most important reason you shouldn't bother posting an herbalife website is that you will never be able to match the prices available on ebay.com.  The auctions there often end with prices that are less than half of the retail price.

I believe that there is a steady stream of herbalifers going out of business, selling off their inventory at or below cost, keeping a glut of herbalife products on the discount market. Try searching for "herbalife retail" or "herbalife business" on ebay.

One other environmentally-friendly way to try selling herbalife is by telemarketing.  You could just open up the white pages and start calling people at random and offering to sell them Herbalife. Wait! I'm just kidding!

Back when I was working at MCI,  I got to talk to the telemarketers sometimes.  Apparently their performance was judged on a 1 or 2% success rate.  That means they had to annoy hundreds of people every day just to get 3-4 people to sign up for long distance. Sometimes they would work all day having people yell at them & not have anyone sign up. They would hire anybody who could operate a telephone because it was so hard to keep the workers motivated. People almost never lasted more than a year in telemarketing.

In summary, successfully selling Herbalife is very difficult and expensive.  The most common herbalife advertising technique is through plastic telephone pole signs and paper fliers. If you aren't willing to do these things, I don't know how you can succeed at this business.  On the other hand, if you are willing to do these things, I don't want you in my community. Your fliers and ugly signs are unwelcome.

Selling Herbalife Distributorships

I've tried to concentrate on the pill and herbal diet supplement side of the business, because if the diet-pill supplement side of the business doesn't really work, then the "home business" part of the herbalife plan can't work either. If a dedicated, hard working person can't really make an honest, legal living selling herbalife pills and supplements, then it is dishonest to promote Herbalife Independent Distributorships as a business opportunity. If it is impossible to sell the product of the business itself, then it is an illegal pyramid scheme.

Maybe you are wondering, "if it is impossible to succeed, how can there be more than 300 success stories on the herbalife website?"

Well, they do claim to have over one million international distributors. That means that only ONE out of every 3,300 distributors has his or her story on the site. What are the the odds against success? I'd call them overwhelming.

It was probably a bit easier back in 1981, when the planet wasn't already saturated with distributors. Twenty years of independent distributor recruiting.  Think about that.