Farmasi is a Turkish based Cosmetics company. On the official about Farmasi page, they say the company is 67 years old, with 80 years of experience. Not sure where the extra 13 years came from, but we’ll carry on.

In 2010 they decided to sell the Farmasi products through a network of ‘Beauty Influencers’. Since then, they say they have been experience several years of ‘triple digit growth’ in sales.

Here at The Finance Guy, we believe you can’t make money with MLM, but we’ll give them a chance to prove us wrong. We’ll do a full review of Farmasi, to find out if their opportunity is a real self employment option, or just another MLM money trap.

What Is The Farmasi Opportunity

To find out what the excitement is about, we looked at the current copy of the Farmasi Opportunity Plan. The first thing it tells us, is that if you join Farmasi, you can be happy, beautiful, and financially successful. All you have to do is use their products and benefit from their ‘highly profitable compensation plan’.

The simple formula is to use the product, recommend it to others, and become a Farmasi Product Influencer. You’ll get your own version of a webpage and a phone app, so you can work your Farmasi gig any time you want, to anyone you want.

The problem with being able to market to absolutely anyone, is that so can everyone else. If you join, you’ll be in competition with all the other Farmasi Product Influencers.

How Do You Earn Money With Farmasi

Most MLMs that we’ve looked at have made the claim that they ‘one of the best compensation plans’, so we’ll look a little closer and see what the Farmasi Compensation plan is all about. It turns out that the full compensation plan is part of the opportunity plan.

The first thing we’ll say is that this document is not well written. Firstly there’s now a reference to the company having 70 years experience. Remember in the about page it was 67 years old with 80 years experience. This discrepancy with years could be an oversight, or it could be that Farmasi is misrepresenting their information.

The compensation plan itself is not easy to read, but we’ll do our best job here to explain all the ways you can earn a commission as a Farmasi Beauty Influencer.

The first thing we deciphered is that in order to qualify for compensation, you need to remain active. To remain active, you need to generate 125 Personal Volume (PV) points. The points are accumulated by spending money with Farmasi. You will need to spend US $125 per month on Farmasi products to qualify for any commission at all. This is common in many MLMs, and it raises the Pay To Play red flag.

If you buy your monthly quota and remain active, you might earn some commission from Farmasi in one or many of the following ways:

Retail Sales
As the name suggests, this is commission you can earn if you are able to sell Farmasi products to retail customers. As an active influencer, you will be able to purchase products at 50% off the recommended retail price. If you sell at full price, you can earn a 50% commission on any sales you make at full retail price.

The retail commission you can earn could increase to as much as 75%, which we will explain as we look at the other ways to earn with Farmasi.

Personal Bonus
This is where you can increase your retail commission by up to an additional 25%. It all comes down to your total Farmasi Group Volume (GV) for the month.

Group Volume includes your PV, which could be products you sell to customers or use yourself. It also includes all the volume of any other Farmasi Beauty Influencers who you have personally sponsored

The amount of GV needed per month for each level of additional commission, is shown below:

You can earn what is known in MLMs as a ‘pass up’ bonus here. This happens when someone in your downline is at a lower level than you. So if you qualify for an extra 9%, and someone you’ve sponsored only gets 3%, then you will be paid the 6% difference in the group volume bonus. In other words, they ‘pass it up’. This does trigger the ‘most of the rewards go to your upline red flag

Leadership Bonus
If you happen to reach the top personal bonus of 25%, then you might qualify for this. The leadership bonus is paid when someone you have sponsored also hits the 25% level. You will no longer be able to earn a personal bonus from them, but now you can earn a leadership bonus.

The leadership bonus is paid on up to 6 generations in your downline. Your first generation, is the people you personally sponsor. Your 2nd generation is the people they sponsor, and so on. Getting paid on 6 generations raises the red flag - More than 5 layers in the payout plan.

The amount of leadership bonus you can earn from Farmasi is shown in the diagram below:

While it is not well explained in the compensation plan, we can see that once you get to the leadership ranks with Farmasi, you can start earning these bonuses. The higher ranks earn more commission and get access to more generations. We are not exactly sure how these bonuses are calculated (because they are so badly explained), butit looks like they are very generous.

While it’s nice to know that the Farmasi Influencers who reach the ‘Boss’ level can earn a total of 25.25% in leadership bonuses, this is not great for new influencers. All this commission is included in the prices charged to you, more than half of what you pay for Farmasi products will go to your upline as commission.

If you’ve ever wondered why people above you in any MLM keep telling you how important it is to buy products, it’s because they are making money off you.

If you make it to the top of the Farmasi ranks, you might also be entitled to a car allowance and some cash bonuses from time to time.

Are Farmasi Influencers Making Money

Well, we know that it’s possible to earn lots of different commissions from Farmasi, now we want to know how much influencers are actually earning.

We looked at what they call the Farmasi Income Disclaimer. This page claims that they can’t give us income details because they are ‘waiting till the end of the first year’.

Well they’ve been an MLM for more than 10 years, so we’re not sure what they mean by this. It could be that they haven’t updated this page since 2010, or it could be that Farmasi doesn’t want to share the earnings information because Farmasi Beauty Influencers are not making money.

Is Farmasi An Illegal Pyramid Scam

Even though MLMs closely resemble pyramids, they are not illegal. The technicalities date back to a 1979 Amway ruling. To the best of our understanding, Amway managed to word their documentation in a way that bypassed the pyramid scheme laws. This opened the doors for other MLMs to do the same.

While the paperwork may make them legal, that doesn’t mean that Monat or any other MLM is ethical. If you join, you have to realize that the only way to make money is if people below you are losing money.

It’s also important to remember that the people above you earn commission when you spend money on MLM products. When they encourage you to keep spending, it could be that they want to keep earning!

One thing we did notice is that Farmasi pays a $30 commission every time you sponsor a new Beauty Influencer. Based on our understanding of the 2018 FTC Business Guidance for MLMs, this is a breach. However this company is based in Turkey, so we can’t be sure what laws apply over there.

Should You Join Farmasi

The only reason to join any MLM, should be if you are already a happy customer. If you are not willing to buy the products at full price, then you’ll probably have hard time selling them to anyone else.

A major concern here, is in the overly generous compensation plan. The only way to pay so much commission and still turn a profit, is if Farmasi products are very over priced, or if very few Influencers earned more than minimum commission.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think in the comments below, especially if you can share your experiences with Farmasi.

Are you wondering if you can make money in an MLM? Check our our list of mlm reviews before you join. If you find one that’s not on the list, let us know and we’ll do our best to write a review