Club Cornerstone Review: Grey area e-commerce platform

Club Cornerstone operate in the e-commerce MLM niche and is headed up by Tom Kudirka, who serves as Club Cornerstone’s CEO.

A corporate address in the US state of Nebraska is provided on the Club Cornerstone, however further research reveals this address belongs to a local post office (UPS).

According to Tom Kudirka’s Club Cornerstone corporate bio;

Tom worked as a Field Engineer for AT&T for over 15 years. He earned an Associates Degree in Electronic Engineering Technology and a Bachelors Degree in Business Information Systems.

Tom is an entrepreneur at heart, with a passion for business. In 1997 he founded 2015 Games and created “Medal of Honor: Allied Assault” for Electronic Arts, garnering both critical acclaim and commercial success.

Many of the team members from 2015 went on to form Infinity Ward, developing the Call of Duty/Modern Warfare series generating billions in sales. Yeah, that’s right, he started all that.

Kudirka doesn’t appear to have a background in MLM, with Club Cornerstone marking first MLM venture.

Read on for a full review of the Club Cornerstone MLM opportunity.

The Club Cornerstone Product Line

Club Cornerstone has no retailable products or services, with affiliates only able to market Club Cornerstone affiliate membership itself.

Club Cornerstone affiliate membership provides access to an e-commerce platform, through which affiliates can purchase groceries from a third-party supplier (US only).

The Club Cornerstone Compensation Plan

The Club Cornerstone compensation plan sees affiliates earn commissions when recruited affiliates order products through the company’s e-commerce platform.

Club Cornerstone Affiliate Ranks

There are six affiliate ranks within the Club Cornerstone compensation plan.

Along with their respective qualification criteria, they are as follows:

• Associate – sign up as a Club Cornerstone affiliate and qualify for commissions
• Bronze – maintain commission qualification, recruit three affiliates and have a total monthly downline volume of $210 GV
• Silver – maintain commission qualification, recruit six affiliates and have a total monthly downline volume of $1000 GV
• Gold – maintain commission qualification, recruit ten affiliates and have a total monthly downline volume of $10,000 GV
• Ruby – maintain commission qualification, recruit fifteen affiliates and have a total monthly downline volume of $100,000 GV
• Diamond – maintain commission qualification, recruit twenty-one affiliates and have a total monthly downline volume of $500,000 GV

Commission Qualification

Club Cornerstone affiliates qualify for commissions by recruiting one affiliate and generating at least $70 in PV each month.

PV stands for “Personal Volume” and is sales volume generated by an affiliate’s own purchase of product.

Residual Commissions

Residual commissions in Club Cornerstone are paid out down two levels of recruitment.

The catch is an affiliate’s downline is organized into a 6×6 matrix, with affiliates only able to earn from deeper levels via rank advancement.

A 6×6 matrix places an affiliate at the top of a matrix, with six positions directly under them:

These initial six positions form the first level of the matrix, with the second level generated by splitting each of the six first-level positions into another six positions each (36 positions).

In this manner subsequent levels of the 6×6 matrix are generated, with a complete matrix housing 55,986 positions.

A Club Cornerstone affiliate starts with a 2×1 matrix, which only has two positions to fill. Unless they advance to the Bronze rank, earning potential is capped at two affiliates.

This is true at the Bronze level too, with earning potential capped until the Silver rank is achieved.

To keep things simple, I’ve provided the maximum number of directly and indirectly recruited affiliates that can be earnt on at each Club Cornerstone affiliate rank below:

• Associate – 2 affiliates
• Bronze – 6 affiliates
• Silver – 39 affiliates
• Gold – 340 affiliates
• Ruby – 3905 affiliates
• Diamond – 55,986 affiliates

Commissions are paid out as a percentage of product purchases made by recruited affiliates.

The first 21 affiliates a Club Cornerstone affiliate recruits pay out a 10% commission. After 21 affiliates, subsequently recruited affiliates pay out 5%.

Affiliates indirectly recruited who are placed in an affiliate’s matrix pay out a flat 5%.

Note that if an affiliate recruits more affiliates than their matrix can currently hold, they are not paid on purchases by those affiliates until they advance in rank and unlock more spaces in their matrix.

Joining Club Cornerstone

Affiliate membership with Club Cornerstone is $25.

Conclusion

From the Club Cornerstone compensation plan:

The income you earn is determined by your effectiveness in building your Marketing Team and helping your Team Members build their Marketing Teams.

While not an outright scam, Club Cornerstone presents several pressing compliance issues.

The first is whether $25 affiliates who don’t recruit are retail customers. Sure they don’t qualify for commissions… but the commission qualifier only requires them to recruit an affiliate.

Retail customers in MLM should be completely cut off from the income opportunity. $25 Cornerstone Club members still have access to the income opportunity, they just haven’t recruited anyone to earn commissions off of yet.

And that brings us to the second compliance issue, recruitment.

In Club Cornerstone the only way to make money is pay $25 and recruit others who do the same. The grey area is commissions are only paid out on product purchases.

A product-based pyramid scheme would exist if the products in the Cornerstone Club e-commerce platform were worthless. I don’t know who is providing the logistics behind the Cornerstone Club platform, but it does appear to be a legitimate storefront with recognizable brands.

Thus it’s a bit of a grey area. You’ve got identifiable affiliate recruitment, however commissions are only paid on the purchase of legitimate products.

For me the deciding factor is tied to the mandatory $70 a month spend. PV typically incorporates retail customer sales, however none exist in Club Cornerstone.

Personal Volume: Total volume of product purchases a Club Member generates during a calendar month.

Thus it’s up to an affiliate themselves to self-qualify for commissions, which in MLM is “pay to play”.

This, in my opinion, drags Club Cornerstone into product-based pyramid territory. Are affiliates purchasing $70 of product because they need it, or are they just doing so to qualify for commissions when affiliates they’ve recruited do the same?

A definitive way to determine this would be to introduce true retail (membership would ideally be free), and have Club Cornerstone affiliates qualify for commissions each month by generating $70 in true retail volume (their own purchases wouldn’t count).

This would not only generate legitimate retail activity, but also demonstrate that Club Cornerstone affiliates aren’t just paying $70 a month for commission qualification.

Unfortunately this is not possible with the Club Cornerstone compensation plan as is, and so we have the grey area the company is currently operating in.

You never have to “sell” a single product to anyone since all products are sold directly by Club Cornerstone to your customers.

Approach with caution.