New to this so bear with me lol and apologise in advance for potentially long post.
About a month ago, an Avon sales leader approached me in a shopping centre in town and asked if I would consider being an Avon Rep. Now I've never done anything like this before so wasn't sure but I have recently returned to work part time after being a sahm for 2 years, whilst I was at home we were relying soley on DP's income to pay mortgage and bills etc so fleetingly thought it would be nice to have a little bit of money on the side to top up our joint account again and go towards the DC's Christmas presents. I also thought if I could get some discount on the products they would make nice Christmas gifts for some family members. So I replied 'maybe.' She gave me the latest catalogue, a leaflet about rewards reps can receive and took my phone number advising she would call me in 3 days to see what I thought.
So 3 days later she phones, ask if she can sign me up, and proceeds to arrange a date to come and visit me at home a week later for what I was led to believe by her wording would be an 'informal no obligation chat'
When she arrived at my house a week later she came in laden with catalougues and order forms and said 'so are you looking forward to earning some extra money then?' As if I had already agreed to definitely become a Rep. She then started the whole pitter patter about how successful she is: 'selling Avon is really easy' she trilled. 'I made £££ in my first campaign, in no time at all I was made a sales leader and shortly after that I was earning so much I was able to quit my previous job and live on my earnings from Avon.' 'Then after that I was promoted to advanced sales leader, you could achieve this you know.' I told her that I already had another job and was really looking just for a bit of extra cash in the run up to Christmas, to which she replied 'oh that's fine, you'll have no problem at all, everyone has heard of Avon and there is lots of positive feedback on our products.' She then told me she would allocate me some streets to distribute brochures to, and told me to distribute them among friends, family, mums at the school gates, the hairdressers etc and said loads of customers put really big orders in at Xmas. She then showed me how to fill in the order forms, said once I had some orders she would come back to the house and talk me through placing my first order and it would be really simple. She then got out a glossy flyer detailing the rewards you could get if your first 4 orders were over a certain amount, a hamper of toiletaries if your first order was over X amount, box of free make up for order 2, designer handbag for order 3 etc.
In hindsight she was quite pushy and persuasive and I found myself agreeing to sign up.
So she said selling Avon was easy. Well 2 weeks later I can honestly say it has been anything but. Easy my ass! I spent ages filling in all the order forms with my name, contact details, delivery dates etc, placed them with the brochures in the plastic bags, then walked round the streets in my territory, posting them through letterboxes, I also delivered them to nursery, work, hairdressers etc, explaining to people that I was now doing Avon, to have a browse through the catalogue and if they wished to place an order that I would be collecting the forms the following Monday. The sales leader also gave me the address of a lady who had so called spoken to her personally and told her she wanted an Avon Rep and was going to be placing regular orders, so I went to her house, she was out when I called so I left her a note explaining who I was, that my sales leader had advised that she liked the products and was interested in ordering, and that if she would like to order this time I would be back to collect on Monday.
Anyway on the Monday I went and collected the brochures and forms, and found I had a grand total of 1 order. To the value of £35.00. Friends, family and work colleagues had not ordered a thing, despite me reminding them on the Saturday that I would be collecting on the Monday. The lady who was so called really interested, she didn't even leave her brochure out for collection. There was a car in the driveway so I knocked on the door but no answer. I drove round on 2 other occasions again no brochure and no answer. The other households in my territory I knocked on the doors of those who hadn't left the brochures out to be told 'thanks but no thanks' of the others left out half of them had written on the front 'not interested, no more brochures please' and one house I went to there were 2 identical brochures out, one was from another Rep. The best bit? The one and only order I did have, the customer didn't put their name address and contact details on the order form, so when I got home and opened all the bags with the forms in I didn't have a clue who it was for!
So I rapidly came to the conclusion that if I was going to go into all that faff just to get 1 order back and obviously not then earning anything as the value of the order was below £75.00, it really wasn't worth me carrying on, so I emailed sales leader, explained everything and said with this in mind I no longer wished to be a rep. She replied back that she had loads of successful reps in her team, which made me feel I had somehow done something wrong, so I googled 'pros and cons of being an Avon Rep, and low and behold, loads of other experiences just like mine, eg pushy sales leader signing them up, telling them it would be really easy etc then found they made a pittance. Also some other alarming stories about reps who had returned orders when customers changed their minds, only for Avon to say they hadn't and started demanding money and threatening with debt collectors. This in itself confirmed my decision to quit. Sales leader then responded with 'well it does take a while to build up a good customer base' - yes the same one who said she had shedloads of orders on her first campaign and was quids in!
Also the more I think about it, the people who are successful reps really have to treat it like a full time job to even get a decent profit, also as order values will differ each month there is no guaranteed income, you don't earn anything for order values under £75.00 so essentially work for nothing, even on orders above this you then only get to keep a quarter of the order value despite the fact that you have done the donkey work of distributing the brochures, collecting them, processing the order forms and putting the orders through, then delivering them to customers often at unsocial hours. Plus out of this 25 percent commission you get you have to pay for the next lot of catalougues and bags, plus as it is considered an 'income' you have to declare to HMRC so have tax and NI deductions.
So really AIBU to think for most people it really is a mugs game and not worth it?
Oh and yes I do now feel rather embarrassed and stupid as I'm normally quite a sensible person and would look into things properly before agreeing to them. As mentioned before sales leader was incredibly pushy. Oh the joy of hindsight.