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 limited choices. The orders are filled by MK, period. Consultants can offer their customers a discount or free shipping, but not both. If you want to offer both to a customer, you have to convince the customer to not place the order on the website and instead order from you directly. 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. 1,100 consultants became active “with the help of” the 30% discount level. (i.e. They got their $225 minimum wholesale completed via the My Shop program.)
Here is Ryan Rogers, CEO, explaining the statistics and talking about changes at Mary Kay Cosmetics. He also mentions that their new consultant sign-ups have gone up since they started the new My Shop program.
A couple of comments from Ryan struck me as funny:
- “The numbers speak for themselves” – Yes they do, Ryan. More than half of the people who set up a My Shop sold nothing.
- “We are changing the game” – A moment of brutal honesty. They are changing the rules for consultants and it only benefits the company.
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?
Visit the
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.
Agreed. 21,000 orders isn’t good. Its a half of an order per participant. That might as well be nothing.
My Shop lets the consultant offer a percentage discount per order, or free shipping but they can’t offer both at the same time. The free shipping is only good for 30 days, and the consultant has to remember to go back in and re-add it if it expires.
Consultants are asking their customers to send them a screenshot of their cart when they are ready to order. They can then send the customer a link to pay them outside Mary Kay so they can offer both free shipping and a discount. The customer would then get inventory from the consultant’s shelf,
If a customer “forgets” to do this, some consultants are refunding the discount and shipping by sending money to the customer through Zelle or Venmo or Stripe.
Thank you. Correcting my description now!
“My Shop lets the consultant offer a percentage discount per order, or free shipping but they can’t offer both at the same time”
As a customer, if I don’t get the discount AND free shipping, I’m not buying. I have PLENTY of other shopping and product options.
That’s too many hoops to jump through.”Sure Mrs. Mary Kay–I need lipstick. I’ll screen shot off the website and send to you.Oh you don’t have it in? That’s ok! I can’t wait 3 weeks for it”. That isn’t how it is going to work. A customer wants the product NOW. They are not willing to wait while you get it in.
MK is in deep doo doo
Right, the whole point of online shopping is that you can go to the exact item you want, add to cart, checkout, and get it in a couple of days. Streamlined, no hassle.
Ain’t no one going to fill up their cart, email it to an IBC, wait to hear back and find out that she might not have what you want, then wait for her to get off her duff, pick your order from her pile of ancient boxes, pack it up, and send it off to you whenever she gets around to it. That’s just kind of stupid, honestly.
The 1,100 number reflected new consultants that signed up, but did not place a $225 wholesale order. They are receiving a 30% discount instead of 50%
Thank you! I was wondering how they were defining active. People are not flocking to sign up for that 30% off like they tried to say that people would.
And I agree, Tracy, that these numbers are honestly small when you think about the number of areas, units, and IBCs there are and the fact this launched during holiday season where people are spending the most.
How do we know this? Because if they didn’t place an order, then they would be NOT active.
Here’s Ryan’s speech where he explains this slide. I think he’s meaning 1100 people signed up to be a consultant AND placed an order, it just wasn’t $225 wholesale.
MK on life support. Just pull the bandaid off quickly..it doesn’t hurt so bad then.
Yes, link please.
But less than $225 isn’t “active” by MK’s definition. Figures they’d start fooling with the rules to make things look less bad.
Just looking at the photo, I would interpret that as 42,000 shops created, 21,000 had an order of some kind even if it was just one lipstick and a consultant was randomly chosen to get credit, 1100 of those had one or more orders that totaled enough to qualify for the 50% discount.
Is Ryan’s speech available somewhere, did he define things differently?
Active: $225 wholesale/$450 retail in one month, consultant remains active for the next two months and qualifies for 50% discount. Needs another $225/$450 order in month #4 to stay active or else they drop to inactive (30% discount). They’re terminated if they have 12 straight months of nothing.
http://www.shanisoffice.pink/uploads/5/0/9/8/5098161/active.pdf
So of 42,000 shops created, only 1100 had enough orders in the first month to be active.
Correction: 21,000 orders placed spread out among the 42,000 shops (1100 of which hit the $225/$450 threshold) not the number of shops that had any size of an order.
Just edited the article to include the relevant part of Ryan’s speech.