Yet Another My Shop Complaint Post
Written by Parsons Green
Teasia Levin is hurt by Mary Kay’s new My Shop! If one of her regular customers uses My Shop and selects the guest check out option, it will remove that customer’s info from her customer list, and she won’t be able to follow up with her to provide Golden Rule customer service. She may even have a stockpile of inventory of this customer’s favorite items that she’ll never be able to sell to her.
Katie Galliart says we should respect customer’s wishes. Leave them alone if they selected guest checkout. Paula Jo Moore is fearful one of her longtime customers won’t know how to use My Shop or an app – and she will have to spend hours on the phone straightening this out.
Amy Davis McCann states that these changes were caused by the government cracking down on other direct selling companies. Don’t worry about Mary Kay though. They go above and beyond.
Bonnie Woerpel-White is concerned by the constant price changes AND having too many lipsticks.
Lynette Brazda Bickley also blames the FTC for these changes. IT laws are like the wild west in space! (In space, can anyone hear you warm chatter?)
Marci Odell had the same issue. She can’t send one of her customers the PCP catalog anymore. Shari Huls Schlapman laments that this is a horrible way to treat consultants who worked for years building up Mary Kay. Shari usually has around $20,000 in inventory on her shelf. Is this retail or wholesale? Only Shari knows.
Lisa Hester emails and texts her customers monthly to remind them order from her directly. Aren’t you glad that ordering from Ulta or Sephora doesn’t involve a middleman?
Jessica Wilkey-Wedman blames the Mary Kay consultants who weren’t working their business properly. Too many were leaving unfilled orders in the old system. Change is good!!!
Cathy Edwards thinks there have been too many changes at a time. She doesn’t care about global customers she cares about what her customers wants. She had several customers who she’s had to transition to each new foundation, and soon she’ll be transitioning them AGAIN!
And finally, Donna Tyson says it out loud. Mary Kay will soon be affiliate marketing. There will no longer be a need for consultants to carry inventory, cutting back on all the commissions who are talked into placing their initial inventory order. Adrianne Valdez wants everyone to know this won’t ever happen. Mary Kay promised!
Maybe some of these directors are finally having a reality check and realizing the direction that Mary Kay is going. Amd maybe they’ll get their financial affairs in order sooner rather than later. Time to find a job!
Visit the
I’m convinced it was specifically designed to be a flustercuck from the outset specifically to get rid of consultants. Simply put even 12 year old kids have designed better apps with numerous bugs. I should know I was one in school. The transition from Apple Hypercard to C+ was hard when we moved from iMacs to Windows 98/2000/XP depending on what corner of the room you were in. Even that hot mess I managed at a credit union wasn’t as bad as MyShop – backend Ubuntu Server frontend a cobbled together hot mess on Win 2000 machines (in 2017) with IE Explorer and ActiveX as a GUI to somehow enter and view data and run expressions on the backend with a LOT of cludges to get Windows and Linux to talk to each other let alone enter and display data and run expressions. Finally redesigned the frontend to run SQL database integration via Firefox on Linux Mint. The reason for using Win 2000 17 years later – the frontend relied on so many bits of Win 2000 that transitioning to XP/7/8 was impossible without totally rewriting everything. And to nobody’s surprise it was very prone to failure for no reason.
They are affiliate adjacent and the winds of full affiliate by the end of the year are blowing. Time to make use of that 90% buyback while you can.
The constant product changes make money for MK but annoy customers. Clinique’s Black Honey is 50 years old. Rimmel Pressed Powder foundation is still the same today as when the FDA tested it in 2011 for heavy metal contaminants. All the MK stuff the FDA tested is gone. Raisinberry lipstick isn’t about. Surprisingly MK tended to contain the lowest amounts of lead, averaging around 2.5ppm and cadmium and arsenic not detected. Amway’s Artistry was high in lead, cadmium and arsenic. Customers hate change, it’s annoying having to switch between products and formulations. Is this year’s honey beige the same as the warm taupe I have? Who knows? Have to book a party and waste 3 hours finding out instead of grabbing another tube of 1.5C drugstore foundation that’s always been the same and always will be.
Disintermediation is a bitch…when you are the middleman!
but…but MK has no middlemen. At least according to their recruiting flyers…
Except the reality is it’s just a pyramid of middlemen, hence the absurd prices for mediocre products. “Middlemen above me, middlemen below me, middlemen to my right, middlemen to my left.”
I am Not Good With Technology, know zilch about programming, and even less about web development, and I couldn’t make that bad of a website if I tried.
I’ve thought from the beginning that it was made deliberately bad in order to force as many huns as possible to quit and not one thing has served to dissuade me.
Thank you, Katie Galliart, for being a voice of reason. I almost always use guest checkout online because I don’t want spam and follow-ups and “you may also like”s. I’m quite able to reorder or browse or contact customer support if I need to on my own.
And if you bought a heap of inventory and were hoping to foist it off on me based on my shopping cart, get outta here you nosy predator.
Yup. They are features not bugs. I agree, not even the most incompetent doughnut could make it this way by accident purely by chance.
The guest checkout customers knew what they were doing alright. That’s why I like online shopping. Just plonk it in a basket, click checkout and it arrives next day. No followup and I can opt out of marketing emails. I can just imagine the sighs of relief from the customers “finally I can order my passionate puce lip gloss without Karen McHun blowing up my phone every 2 seconds for a face-wash at her kitchen sink sorry a facial.”
I don’t know why they keep saying that MK “hurt” them. Don’t they realize they’re a means to an end? The company is phasing them out and they’re hanging on like rabid pink dogs.
Really they need to wake up and see what we all see – the writing on the wall. Get your 90% back while you can. Because WHEN not if MK shuts down it’ll be like AU/NZ and consultants will be locked out of the site and lose everything. No takesie backsies.
In the past customers always had to shop through a consultant. With MyShop offering guest checkout, it is no longer a requirement. “Loyal” customers who have had to shop with their consultant are finally able to get their products without being annoyed by automated texts and emails from them. The whole personal service flies out the window and MKC becomes like every other online cosmetic company. However, I think Mary Kay corporate is in for a rude awakening on annual sales earnings when they realize how much money they are losing because consultants ( the ultimate customer) are no longer buying huge inventories regardless of the “prizes” the company offers. The public consumer will never surpass the “sales” generated by consultants and directors.
I think Ryan is hoping for “hmm numbers are down time to sell to another company/investor and fly off to the Cayman Islands on my Gulfstream from the proceeds” a la Lyle Lanley from the monorail episode from The Simpsons. Whether or not Coty et al are interested in MK as a new line or not I don’t know but I doubt it after the Younique debacle. Ex MLMs are not great to invest in and not attractive for many reasons (poor reputation, outdated image, etc) so he may have shot himself in the foot but time will tell whether his exit plan works out.
“The public consumer will never surpass the ‘sales’ generated by consultants and directors.”
Not at current prices anyway. Once they eliminate the high cost of the MLM distribution channel by eliminating all that costly commission overhead, they can finally drop retail prices (probably 75% or more) to be reasonable and competitive for the quality. Then they just might create true market demand!
When the My Shop was first introduced the company said it was going to be a great asset, making it even easier for our customers to click one button to place an order with their consultant . In actuality when they launched My Shop, then they disclosed we weren’t able to manage all of our customers, consultants were the third party now… after the top director trip several directors were saying how great the new my shop was going to be, along with the new 30% commission for inactive or t status consultants… giving the impression consultants would be able to upsell their customers with the online orders… of course now we know they never intended to offer consultants the chance to use Monica’s 50% off specials..( one half priced product for each $50 in retail sales) or upsell. And supposedly the My Shop was launched in Germany in June, so why is the US market having so many issues with losing customers info etc? Shouldn’t those kinks already been fixed? Is Craig Carter (head of IT) that incompetent? Or is it the more likely case that the company wants to minimize all commissions paid, shrink the sales force so they can say we have to go big with Amazon or whatever store they partner with to mass market the product eliminating consultants to save Mary Kay? Affiliate adjacent isn’t going to last too much longer, eliminating products, reformulating and raising prices strains the already strained sales force..