Mary Kay My Shop Success
Mary Kay’s new “My Shop” for beauty consultants has been live for just over a month. This is supposed to be a new and improved way for consultants to sell products, but the real truth seems to be that this is a way to transition the company to an affiliate model either alongside or in place of the current MLM model.
Under the old system, a consultant could pay for a website that was run by Mary Kay Cosmetics. The company maintained the online shopping sites but the consultants had some choice in how they did business. They could either fill the orders themselves (which gave them flexibility in terms of discounts, gifts with purchase, shipping, etc.) or they could have Mary Kay ship the products directly to the customer.
With the new My Shop program, consultants have no choices. The orders are filled by MK, period. No way to apply discounts, give free shipping, or customize anything. Consultants make 30% to 50% of the selling price of the products, depending on whether they’re “active” or not. That might sound okay, but one big problem is that consultants have inventory sitting in closets and basements that needs to be moved out the door, and this new system doesn’t allow them to do that.
I bet you wonder how well the new My Shop is working? I’m glad you asked. I’d love to tell you.
Mary Kay offered up the statistics from the first month of the new online shops at their leadership conference in Nashville for sales directors and national sales directors. 42,000 consultants signed up for a shop. 21,000 orders were placed. And somehow 1,100 consultants involved in this whole process were active. (Does that mean the other 40,900 consultants who signed up for an online shop aren’t active???)
How do we feel about 21,000 orders? On average, there was one order placed for half of the consultants in the program. That doesn’t sound very good to me, but maybe my expectations are off?
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The biggest part of this, to me, is seeing how few customer orders there really are.
This isn’t frontloaded consultants trying to unload stuff after much begging and whining (since no one tracks that) but people who wanted MK products enough to click on a website and buy them. What’s more, buy them under pretty ideal conditions: no party, no upsell, no nagging.
That’s not a lot of orders from a company that loves to brag about how big and successful it is.
It’s a big “oh hell no” to all the lies that have been told about carrying inventory: the products sell themselves. You can’t sell from an empty wagon – this is the wagon factory itself and it’s not selling stuff.
It will be very interesting indeed to see how this plays out over the next 3 to 6 months and post seminar.