How much money can you earn with MLM Usborne Books at Home?

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YOU ARE READING: How much money can you earn with MLM Usborne Books at Home? – Talented Ladies Club AT PhebinhvanhocEN

Are you thinking of joining a usborne book direct sales company (also known as mlm) at home? find out how much money you can expect to earn.

since we started researching mlm almost three years ago, we have heard many people say, “my mlm is different”. but we have yet to discover an mlm that has a business model that we would recommend.

You are reading: Usborne books income disclosure

One company that is often cited by its reps as “not like other mlms” is usborne books at home (hereinafter simply “usborne”).

perhaps because they sell children’s books, and we see their products in retail stores and online (which, ironically, is one of the reasons the mlm arm of the business doesn’t seem to work for many people) and schools, it’s easy to assume that the company is “nice” and even respectable.

As a result, some people assume that the structure of their compensation plan and the behavior of their mentors and team leaders must be superior to other mlm’s like arbonne and herbalife.

but we have not yet investigated an mlm that was different. so we were curious how usborne worked.

(another mlm that is also believed to be a “better” company is avon; find out why we believe that myth is not true here).

we decided to find out if usborne was really a ‘different’ mlm

our curiosity was piqued even more when we were approached by a woman who had just been hired by an usborne mentor. This woman was a typical mlm target: she finds it difficult to find work that suits her caregiver role and she is worried about money.

She told us she’s generally wary of mlms, but the woman who recruited her managed to convince her that (surprise!) usborne was different and a safe bet.

He was promised that he didn’t need to recruit, nor did he have to make sales quotas or buy shares. As a result, she saw it as a risk-free investment.

but we suspected. From our experience researching mlms, we didn’t think it was that different, nor that there would be no pressure to sell (or personally buy) books from your upline once you were selling.

so we decided to investigate usborne and find out how much you can earn from them, and what kind of experiences their organizers actually have.

you can buy the cheaper books elsewhere

The first thing that struck us was how expensive usborne books are if you buy them through an organizer at full price. especially since you can buy them much cheaper elsewhere. surely that would make them hard to sell?

To illustrate how much more expensive books are through usborne books at home, if you were to join usborne in the uk right now, your £48 starter pack would include these books:

To the right, list the retail price of each book and state that the total retail value is £144.82. But we know you can buy much cheaper Usborne books in stores and online (we often see them at TK Maxx and discount retailers). so we decided to price usborne’s starter pack ourselves.

To make the comparison as fair as possible, we only list new, full-price (no deals) books from well-known retailers like amazon (not ebay or discount stores).

We were still able to buy all the previous books, brand new and out of sale, for £101.97, saving us £42.85. if we had included new books on special offer, we would have saved even more.

Of course, even with the price comparison, it seems like a good deal to get all these books for just £48 in your starter kit (the kit also includes stationery worth £10.50).

Are usborne organizers the real customers?

but is it really? We know that one of the accusations leveled at MLMs is that the reps are the real customers. is it possible that this is also true in usborne?

a clue to the answer to this is in the usborne home book organizer manual:

“in the unlikely event that you do not ship orders totaling more than £120 within 12 weeks of joining usborne, you will be billed for the difference between the price you paid for the starter kit and the retail price. ”

then if you fail to sell £120 worth of usborne books in your first three months, usborne will force you to pay the full retail price of these books.

If we exclude marketing materials, you’ll end up paying us £96.82 (£144.82 – £48). And remember, you can easily buy all these books cheaper elsewhere.

so who is the real customer here? why does usborne insist that “failing” organizers pay full sale price for the books? especially since they know that retailers sell their books for less?

Our guess is that it’s a pressure tactic to ensure new recruits make enough early sales. or make personal purchases to exceed £120 if your sales fall short.

After all, if you’re going to pay us back £96.82 for books you already own (you’re not really getting anything for your money), you might as well spend that money on additional books by ordering back-up yourself. .

you need to sell £120 a month every three consecutive months to stay active

Virtually every mlm we’ve found has a minimum sales requirement for reps to stay with the company and/or qualify for commission.

and usborne is no different. if you wish to maintain your usborne organizer status, you must sell £120 worth of books in any three consecutive month period:

if you don’t, it will be “idle”. and if you do not achieve the minimum sales in any month in six months, you will be automatically terminated without notice:

“…we will automatically withdraw without notice any organizer who has submitted sales of less than £120 in any month in a period of six consecutive months.”

how much commission do you earn with usborne books?

so how much do you really earn from usborne books at home? As an organizer you earn 24% of the total sales value of each order. so if you sold £100 of books you would earn £24. and if you sold €40 you would earn €9.60.

but you will also need to pay your commission costs:

so from your sales you will need to pay for shipping and the cost of profits to the host of the party. This means that if you were to sell £100 worth of books, the actual amount you would earn would be £18 (£24 less party charges of £2 and transport charges of £4).

and if you sold £40 worth of books, your profit would be just £2.10 (£9.60 less £2 party charges, £4 transport charges and £1.50 additional management fees).

How much effort and time did it take you to earn £2.10? Let’s say you hosted a party for an hour. and I spent a total of two hours preparing it, making arrangements with the host, packing, and traveling to and from the venue.

That’s a total of three hours spent earning just £2.10, or 70p an hour. Even if he sold £100 worth of books at the party, his hourly income would only be £6. By contrast, the current national minimum wage in the UK for someone over 25 is £8.21.

do usborne organizers pay to stay active?

One reason so many mlm reps end up in debt is because they end up buying products themselves to stay active, qualify for commissions, and earn bonuses and promotions.

We heard this from the ex-younique and it works with the reps we’ve interviewed. and according to this interview on uncensored uzzies, the same thing happens in usborne:

This same former usborne organizer also reveals that, after taxes and expenses, her net income was “low, almost zero.”

‘after five months of work I ended up losing £2.43’

and she’s not the only one having a hard time making money with usborne. Here’s what another former usborne organizer had to say about her experience:

“after five months of hard work I ended up with -£2.43 and only managed to get that amount back because I found another local organizer to buy all my shares for half the price they were worth.

They don’t exactly lie, but they leave things out to get you to join… they don’t tell you that you have to pay postage and that you lose most of your commission if you order under £100.

that there are so many organizers in your area that they are even in the damn marketing material! that each group or event of young children will charge you money. that the exact same books are cheaper elsewhere, so the only way to sell them is to cut prices and not make a profit.

that you can’t work with schools (for a better commission) until you’ve sold £600 worth of books. oh yes, which I finally accomplished two days before I left. except it doesn’t count because they weren’t 6x £100 orders.

[in total as organizer] I sold £600 worth of usborne books. my mentor made about £30 on it and I ended up at a disadvantage. sometimes i work 12 hours a day on that also planning parties online etc. however, what really pissed me off… every time I said this wasn’t working or complained about how hard I was working for no money, I was told it was because I was being negative!”

Sadly, everything in this woman’s experience is familiar across the board in mlms: overpriced products that are hard to sell, saturation of other reps competing against you, costs that eat up the money you make, being told that it’s you who failed if it doesn’t work for you and you will lose money.

Just as we suspected, usborne books at home appears to be just like any other mlm, with no noticeable difference that we can see.

how much money can you make selling books to schools?

a carrot dangling in front of usborne organizers is the opportunity to sell books to schools and libraries. Hopefully, many reps we’ve talked to believe this is where real money can be made.

but is this true? If you sell to a school, you earn a 20% commission on the total sales value of each order. the commission is not too generous, so organizers should go for high-volume orders.

However, in order to sell to schools and libraries, you must have submitted six party orders over £120. And as we’ve seen from the experience of the organizer above, apparently this isn’t easy to achieve.

Furthermore, even once you are allowed to sell to schools and libraries, you are competing against genuine representatives of other businesses and established online businesses like book people who can wholesale books to schools, including usborne books themselves. like you – for much less than its retail price.

for example, seeing the inside of your body retails for £9.99 in the usborne starter kit, but schools can buy it for £7.99 from book people. and your mental health care is available for £2.99 – £4 less than the retail price listed on the starter kit.

To compete with this established retailer, you must offer your books for less than their prices. can you even buy books for so little usborne in the first place? and even if you do, your commission would be minuscule. for example, a 20% commission on £2.99 is just 59p, and that’s without deducting any costs.

usborne is also not mentioned in this list of book providers for elementary school libraries.

So, even if you manage to sell 6 book orders over £120 (without buying any yourself to make that magic number), how successful do you think you’ll be selling to schools and libraries for a steady income?

And if you can build a relationship with your local schools and libraries, you’ll need to offer your books at a significant discount in order to compete, and then you’ll only get a 20% commission minus costs.

Is usborne books at home a pyramid scheme?

Many people believe that mlms are pyramid schemes. but what about usborne books at home? could that be considered a pyramid scheme?

In order for an MLM not to be classified as an illegal pyramid scheme, participants must make money from sales to the public, rather than recruiting. So is it possible to make a living with us through retail sales?

Suppose you have four parties a month and at each party you sell £100 worth of books. this will earn you £72 in commission. (this is before general business expenses are deducted). Even if you were to throw four £100 a week parties every week, you’d only make £324, which is unfortunate. and for this, you would need to have sold £1,800 worth of books.

so no, we don’t think it’s possible to make decent money from books passed down by us just through retail sales. you need to recruit.

If you recruit someone below you as an organizer, you can earn an ongoing 6% Mentor Bonus on the sales of anyone you recruit. but (there’s always a but with mlms) for you to get this bonus, you and your recruit must send in a minimum of £120 sales per month.

So what do you do if you’ve hit £120 in a month, but your recruit has only sold £80? buy shares of them to top them up? or pressure them to make more sales (or buy shares themselves)?

Even if they hit that magical €120, their Mentor Bonus would only be €7.20.

The next rank above usborne organizer is team leader. To be promoted to this level, you and at least four organizers you have personally recruited must achieve £1,800 or more in team sales in a single month.

and you and at least four organizers you have personally recruited must have sold orders worth at least £120 that month.

again, imagine you’re close to the promotion one month, but an organizer doesn’t make his £120. what do you do? just let all that hard work go to waste and start over again next month? Or do you place orders through that organizer yourself, or do you pressure them to buy more books (for “stock”) to get the promotion?

you need to work very hard to earn very little

Let’s say you become team leader. You automatically get a £120 rank advancement bonus (doubles to £240 if promoted within four months of joining).

Thereafter, you earn a 5% commission (called a personal team bonus) on your team sales each month, providing:

you earn £120 in sales that month.
your team collectively earns £1,800 in sales that month.
four organizers below you are ‘active’ ( which means they have made £120 in sales a month every three consecutive months).

so what does this mean for you financially? Let’s figure it out, assuming you only qualify:

If your £120 is from a single party, you earn £22.80 commission.
You earn £90 commission on your team’s collective sales.
You earn £28.80 mentor bonus because four members of your team sold £120.

your total income? £238.80 before expenses. for the stress of building and running a team that collectively sells over £1,800 worth of books for usborne. If you had a minimum wage job, you would only need to work six hours a week to earn it.

We don’t know about you, but that seems ridiculously low for the hours and effort you’ll put in, not to mention the expense of running your “business.” It’s no wonder that research on mlms published by the FTC shows that, on average, 99.6% of participants will lose money when business expenses are factored in.

oh, and to maintain your rank, you must be paid at this level at least once every three consecutive months. just to keep the pressure on.

we estimate the basic daily income in upper usborne to be just £84.71

but what if you climb straight to the top of usborne and reach the dizzying heights of executive leader, their highest rank? how much can you earn then?

To qualify as an executive leader, you need three things:

You need to qualify as a team leader (but your personal sales quota doubles to over £240 a month).
Your team needs to make £30,000 in sales that month.
you need eight qualified team leader ‘legs’ (this means eight people you personally recruited must qualify as a team leader that month).

and you must achieve this once every six consecutive months to maintain your rank.

so how much can you earn if you meet the minimum requirements for this rank? From what we can see from their complicated compensation plan, here’s what you’ll get:

£45.60 commission from two personal parties. (if more groups are involved, your earnings will be reduced).
£1500 commission on your team’s collective sales.
£230.40 mentoring bonus because 32 members of your team sold £120.
£130 (0.5%) Executive Leader Bonus.

The first month you become an Executive Leader, you also earn a £1,200 rank advancement bonus.

so your total income (not counting the one-time rank advancement bonus) for personally spearheading sales of £30,000 of usborne books is a measly £1,906.

Let’s say there are 22.5 business days in a month. this means your daily income is £84.71, before expenses. And remember, this is Usborne’s top rank. (As with our team leader calculation, we’ve based it on the bare minimum you can earn at this rank.)

what is it like to work as a usborne organizer?

The only way to really know what it’s like to be a usborne organizer is to talk to people who have worked for the company. Here’s what a former organizer told us about his experience.

“there was a lot of pressure to recruit”

I never managed to rank up in usborne. there was a lot of pressure to recruit other members, which I personally couldn’t do, since I couldn’t lie to people and tell them they would make money, when I couldn’t myself.

I don’t drive and I live in an area where for many children the only hot meal they get is the free school meal provided five days a week, and parents don’t even read the school books they receive. sent home every week, so it was difficult for me to find clients.

I’m also too honest for my own good and would tell people if they could buy a cheaper book from the works, the book people or amazon etc.

“lost around £1000 in six months”

I was my best customer. it was always out of my pocket. then there are the team building meetings that convince you of what you need, which means more travel and food expenses when you get there, etc.

my team mentor put a lot of pressure on me to get more sales; to buy books to build my own collection for book stands and parties. and have parties that I couldn’t do, even if people were interested, since I didn’t have childcare and didn’t feel comfortable hosting in my own home.

He told me that he had made hundreds in sales and every time he had problems they told me that I wasn’t doing enough, that I had to travel to other places and do stalls, etc.

i joined usborne because i homeschool my kids and i had heard about the deals they do for schools so i thought it would be great to be able to offer other homeschoolers great discounts and free books. but to be able to offer those rates, you need to progress and have a lot of sales.

I only worked as a usborne organizer for six months (I was inactive for another six until I was made redundant) and lost around £1000.

“would encourage people to put up their own money”

I did fairs, playgroup book reading groups, community markets, etc. maybe i got a handful of customers after months of facebook deals, and all of the above, and most of the books that were ordered were out of stock.

my mentor’s mentor even started harassing me for my sales. They never said it was because it fills their pockets, but I knew it was. they encouraged people to put up their own money, and when people weren’t doing so well, they blamed them for not putting up more.

we were part of a group where all reps posted. I can’t stand lies and it made me depressed to see people lie to new members like that. after a while without sales they fired me from being a representative.

“anyone who speaks ill of us will be brought to justice”

They made it clear in the group several times that anyone who spoke ill of us would be taken to court, so I had to bite my tongue several times when people showed up on facebook trying to recruit others. The bottom line is that you have to put in a lot of money, time, and effort for little or no reward.

and then to get further, you have to lie to people in the same situation as you. people who are really struggling and looking for ways to earn money for their families while spending time with their families.

It really opened my eyes to these pyramid schemes, and I think it’s horrible how people are allowed to do this.

“all I did was lose money”

another former usborne organizer told her story to timeless vie. here is an excerpt:

“finally, after months of struggling to try & receive orders from my locality, I decided to resign. I tried to sell my stock at a discount to other sellers, including my manager, but they all said they didn’t need it. so, wanting to get rid of it, i put everything on ebay. It must have been worth several hundred pounds, and I got about £30 back. and who bought it yes, the manager who didn’t need anything.

“so yeah, he was naive, but even with a decent business brain & very motivated, all I did was lose money. the obsession, as with all these companies, was to recruit, recruit, recruit, but there was no way to scam my friends, so I lost. The moral of the story is don’t assume that these long-standing companies have more integrity than youniques and juice plus, because in my experience they don’t.”

but i know someone doing well in usborne!

every time we publish research on mlms, we hear someone claim that a friend of theirs seems to be doing well in that company. but is that really true?

the hint here is “seems to be”. We know that MLM recruits are trained by their uplines to lie about their success; after all, how do you recruit someone if you’re honest about how little you’re making? And as we’ve seen in every mlm we’ve researched, you can’t make money without recruiting.

We’ve also seen mlm reps pretend their lifestyle is due to their mlm business, when in fact it’s funded by their parents’ wealth (as in the case of a well-known nu skin influencer ) or your husband or partner (again, we’ve seen this happen with forever living).

Sadly, we’ve also learned that mlms, as a general rule, doesn’t seem to encourage their reps to keep the proper books on their business, or register with hmrc, which is a legal obligation if you’re selling enough to pay. tax. this may be because their representatives never earn enough to pay taxes.

but it could also be that keeping books, which is a good basic business practice that everyone should do, reveals how little they are actually making. (or how much they are losing) and mlms benefit from their reps not knowing their real financial situation; so they can tell themselves they’re doing fine when they receive a £20 commission check, not realizing that the commission is on their own purchases, so it’s actually a loss.

Almost every former mlm rep we’ve interviewed didn’t realize they had lost until they left and finally did the sums. when they were in business (and losing money) they would have honestly told someone that they were doing well.

so when someone tells us that a friend of theirs is doing well in mlm, we are skeptical, and this includes usborne. as you can see from our calculations above, it seems very difficult to make decent money with usborne, even if you reach the highest rank.

what about any money someone at the top of an mlm earns? sadly, from what we’ve been told, it seems likely that this is coming from the poor reps below them being pressured to buy shares themselves in order to qualify to stay active and shore up the fragile range structure of their uplines.

as always, it seems to us that the only people who can possibly make serious money in mlm is the company itself and a handful of people in the higher ranks. everyone else appears to be just customers, disguised as reps selling for them.

should you join mlm usborne books at home?

Like all the mlms we’ve researched so far, we just can’t see how you can make good money from usborne books at home. certainly none of the former usborne reps who contacted us did.

and even though some of their reps claim that usborne is “different” from other mlms, we see too many similarities to believe it. just like other mlms:

reps lure usborne organizers with the promise that it’s easy to make money.
usborne organizers need to sell (or buy) a specific amount to stay active.
usborne’s compensation plan looks complicated and hard to keep up in the ranks, forcing reps to push their teams.
usborne’s compensation plan encourages and rewards Recruitment: You must build a team to get the bonuses and additional commissions. .
The one who fails is told that it was not the business that failed, it was him; they didn’t work they had enough or were too negative.
former usborne organizers are afraid to speak publicly about their experience.
products are hard to sell: identical products are widely available for least on the high street and online.
the market is saturated: you are competing against other usborne reps in your area.

All things considered, usborne books at home seem no different from other mlms.

Time and time again, research shows that the vast majority of mlm participants will lose money once expenses are deducted. And most mlm reps will work for much, much less than minimum wage, even before expenses are factored in.

so based on this, no, personally we would never recommend anyone to join us through books at home.

do you want to know more about usborne books?

If you want to learn more about usborne and hear from a former organizer, you can watch this detailed video:

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How much money can you earn with MLM Usborne Books at Home? – Talented Ladies Club