Shopify performs a service, Herbalife does not. Shopify recruits people, Herbalife sells inventory.
I don't see Shopify asking for upfront payments from their affiliates.
Not to mention the fact that a successful Shopify store relies on skill at SEO, social media and picking the right products. Herbalife relies on being early enough in the "reverse funnel" and having a lot of people downstream (not skill).
There is literally no similarities between Shopify and HerbaLife beyond a program recruiting people, which basically every large site has.
Here are the topics I have received for a store recently (I'm sure it's targeted).
-Protect your reputation using social media
-Lifelong learnings for entrepreneurs
-Get the perfect photo
-6 Bulletproof ways to improve conversions
-How to track your marketing campaign
If I look at a few months of emails, there is only 1 that is "make millions type" and it's titled "How two entrepreneurs generated $91,470 in 3 months"[1] and it's an interview with the store owners. I don't see anything wrong with that.
https://www.shopify.com/blog/14917217-how-two-ecommerce-entr...
The sketchy marketing I see for Shopify (FBA, dropshipping) is from users who are selling a course they made.
Other than that though there's very little relation between the two Shopify really doesn't sound like a pyramid scheme even from this page.
And in reality, if you have a good product and decent marketing skills you could use Shopify to build an online store and easily become a millionaire. It's not a stretch, IF you have a good product and decent marketing skills.
>Not to mention the fact that a successful Shopify store relies on skill at SEO, social media and picking the right products. Herbalife relies on being early enough in the "reverse funnel" and having a lot of people downstream (not skill).
Silly! Don't you know that Herbalife relies on skill at salesmanship, networking and picking the right products.[1] Shopify on the other hand relies on you being early enough in the "reverse funnel" and having a lot of people downstream.
The crash-and-burn charts Citron links to are also pretty damning. This seems almost exactly like Herbalife from where I'm sitting.
Shopify does not appear to be a pyramid scheme. I see nothing to suggest that you recruit other sellers recursively in order to generate revenue.
Herbalife is primarily noteworthy because they are a pyramid scheme. If you say that something is like Herbalife, then you’re strongly implying that other thing is also a pyramid scheme. If I say my cousin is like Vincent Van Gogh, you’d assume I mean that he’s a brilliant painter. If I was actually trying to convey that my cousin only has one ear, you’d understandly find my statement misleading, and probably poorly conceived.
Funny, I just searched "google ads millionaire" and it returned 6M results, as well as 30k from Youtube. By Citron's logic, Google is also like Herbalife.
Now, he might have a case if Shopify and Google generated these pieces of content themselves, but he makes no attempt to discover where the content originates.
Back when I was working at Google there clearly was tension between people who were promoting the AdSense platform and Google's desire to have more inventory. Much of it seemed to fall into the "we didn't tell them to do this, they just came up with it on their own."
At the time (2006 - 2008 or so) the "deal" was person A would get a partner ID and they would resell Google ads through their partner ID to shops that they recruited. It was so bad that after I had left Google and joined Blekko the easiest web spam page to detect was the same AdSense ID across more than a handful of domains. The ranking team de-indexed every site where the AdSense ID appeared on more than 50 different URLs and it pruned a very significant chunk of the index of 'web spam'.
The only point I'm trying to make is that when your platform makes money on a per-use basis, whether its transactions or page views, there are people who will use that to create affiliate type businesses.
Also, I'm disappointed that Herbal Life was only required to pay $200 million. Their predatory practices destroyed lives in order to enrich top dogs in the business, and that makes my blood boil
[1] http://www.citronresearch.com/citron-exposes-ubiquiti-networ...
What's up with this flagging? A contrarian opinion on a tech darling shouldn't be a basis for removal from the front page.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9583196
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8032614
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13200455
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14209161
You have a vigilante shorter that roams around markets “identifying fraud and terminal business models” and using strawman arguments with little research to improve his position.
This is probably just as sketchy as his claims about Shopify’s marketing and referral tactics are.
Crazy how prices can be manipulated by these people so easily.
