I last reviewed Skinny Body Care late last year. One of the key-concerns identified was ‘the pushing of products onto affiliates as a commission qualifier.‘

After signing up, a Skinny Body Care affiliate are strongly encouraged to purchase products to qualify for commissions.

While there is nothing inherently problematic about affiliates purchasing products, to do so to qualify for commissions encourages chain-recruitment.

That is you sign up as a new Skinny Body Care affiliate, purchase products to qualify for commissions and get paid when you recruit new affiliates who do the same.

In this scenario the products become irrelevant and the income opportunity itself becomes what is actually being marketed and sold.

One Skinny Body Care affiliate even went so far as to claim most affiliates are on autoship to “protect their income“.

In light of the recent Vemma and Herbalife busts, which identified affiliate purchases as a primary source of revenue indicative of pyramid fraud, one would think MLM companies across the board would be doing everything they can to encourage retail sales.

Not Skinny Body Care. They’ve doubled down on their affiliate autoship recruitment model and introduced a “Legacy Matrix”.

Labelled “optional” to take part in, an official marketing video claims it’s “one of the most powerful parts” of the Skinny Body Care compensation plan.

To qualify for the Legacy Matrix, a Skinny Body Care affiliate must generate and maintain 100 PV a month.

This PV can come from affiliate purchase of product (including autoship) or retail sales volume.

Designed to reward people who are committed to making Skinny Body Care the LAST company they ever have to be involved with, the Legacy Matrix is a once-a-year Bonus exclusively for Distributors who maintain 100bv in Personal Volume each month.

The Legacy Matrix utilizes a 3×7 matrix compensation structure.

A 3×7 matrix places an affiliate at the top of a matrix, with three positions directly under them:

These three positions form the first level of the matrix. The second level of the matrix is generated by splitting the first three positions into another three positions each.

Levels three to seven of the matrix are generated in the same manner, with each new level housing three times as many positions as the previous level.

Positions are filled by Skinny Body Care affiliates who generate and maintain 100 BV a month.

Commissions are generated monthly as 1% of the 100 PV qualifying volume ($1).

The Legacy Matrix pays annually, with a full matrix (3279 positions) paying $39,348 annually.

The problem lies in the majority of Skinny Body Care affiliates qualifying with 100 PV a month via autoship or manual self-purchase sales.

This reduces the Legacy Matrix to a 100 PV a month, $39,348 chain-recruitment commission.

You sign up as a Skinny Body Care affiliate with a 100 PV a month autoship. Recruit others who do the same and start earning thousands of dollars a year for doing so.

Owing to the nature of how the Legacy Matrix is filled, both direct and passive recruitment efforts generate commissions.

The only way to legitimately run a compensation plan component like the Legacy Matrix would be to ensure at least 50 PV a month generated by each qualifying affiliate was retail sales volume.

Skinny Body Care has no retail volume qualifiers for Legacy Matrix qualification.

Given the emphasis on affiliate purchases to “protect income” in the rest of the Skinny Body Care compensation, it’s extremely likely that most affiliates will qualify via self-purchase.

You can verify this yourself by asking your upline (or potential upline) what their monthly retail sales volume is (ask for retail receipt proof, don’t accept “I bought the products to resell them” promises).

The cynic in me would even go so far as to claim the Legacy Matrix is an attempt to keep affiliates on autoship year after year.

An income calculator on the Skinny Body Care website shows exactly how much can be made per affiliate recruited.

How many people will be in your 3×7 Legacy Matrix?

How many people will you personally enroll who participate in the Legacy Matrix?

On average, how many people will each of your personally enrolled Distributors who are in the Legacy Matrix have under them in their 3×7 Legacy Matrix?

What Rank will you achieve?

Despite showing income potential that can be correlated to affiliate autoship recruitment, Skinny Body Care claim the calculator is “for entertainment purposes only” and “in no way a guarantee of how much income you will earn in your Legacy Matrix.”

Riiiiiiiiight.

Retail sales are of course not mentioned anywhere on the Legacy Matrix calculator page.

To what extent Skinny Body Care management are aware of the current MLM regulatory environment in the US is unclear.

Adding a compensation component that all but encourages annual affiliate autoship participation suggests they either aren’t aware or, worse still, simply don’t care.