Protecting the integrity of the UnFranchise Business, the MPCP, and the Shopping Annuity is of the utmost importance for our corporate leadership team. To ensure the protection of key fundamentals of our business, we have various policies in place which are meant to prevent UFOs from selling our exclusive Market America products outside the realm of SHOP.COM and the UnFranchise Business. As some UnFranchise Owners already know, Market America products have occasionally been listed for sale on Amazon.com by UnFranchise Owners who either don’t know this is a direct violation of our compliance guidelines, or simply don’t care to comply with them. Anytime this happens it threatens the integrity of our business and undermines the success of UFOs around the world. We won’t stand for that.
Gaming the system by selling Market America products on unauthorized third party sites like Amazon only hurts yourself and your fellow UnFranchise Owners in the long run. We have aggressively sought to correct these actions and prevent our products from being listed on Amazon.com currently and in the future – because we view this type of behavior to be an affront to the very spirit of the UnFranchise Business. Unauthorized online sales of Market America products on Amazon have recently seen a drastic drop as our compliance and legal teams have been working hand in hand with Amazon to remove exclusive Market America products from their site, while also attempting to establish a systematic process between Amazon and Market America to safeguard against these products appearing on their site in the future. So far the results have been quite impressive.
Our legal and compliance teams have done exemplary work serving as the first line of defense in protecting UFOs and the UnFranchise Business against unauthorized sales of Market America products. Since October of 2016, these teams have been able to successfully remove 73% of all unauthorized stores selling Market America products on Amazon. Out of the 95 stores that were conducting unauthorized sales of Market America products, 69 of these stores have been take down. Thirty of the stores were current UnFranchise Owners. Upon learning the names of these violators, these teams initiated Market America’s Corrective Action Procedure against all 30 UnFranchise Owners, and as a result 17 of them voluntarily removed their stores from Amazon immediately. The remaining 13 UFOs chose to ignore our demands and did not remove their stores from Amazon, and as a result Market America terminated their UnFranchise Businesses. Market America has zero tolerance for these types of actions and the integrity of the UnFranchise Business is something we will always defend.
These are truly impressive results for just eight months of work, and we applaud our legal and compliance teams for their diligence and tenacity in protecting our UFOs and the UnFranchise Business. While theirs is an ongoing task yet to be completed, it’s still a tremendous accomplishment and something worth acknowledging. These talented teams will always be there to protect you and your UnFranchise Business, as they continue to aggressively pursue the violators of our unauthorized online sales policy and enforce our zero tolerance policy for these types of actions. But they are not alone in this fight.
As UnFranchise Business Owners it’s up to all of us to not only familiarize ourselves with the proper business practices but to also ensure that our teams are following the guidelines and policies that were created to protect the growth and integrity of our business. Our team is extremely proactive in seeking out unauthorized sales of Market America products on third party sites, but UnFranchise Owners can also play a key role in this effort by reporting any unauthorized sales they discover by emailing our compliance team at: internetcompliance@marketamerica.com.
Protecting the integrity of our business is a critical task but we can all make a difference by working together and remaining true to the ethics and fundamentals of the UnFranchise.
Keep Growing!
-JR Ridinger