There’s a rather lengthy white paper on the dominance of Amazon in the ecommerce space. It’s safe to say that Amazon is absolutely dominating e-commerce. In my opinion, Amazon’s dominance impacts direct sales organizations and the white paper below is worth studying. Due to Amazon’s amazing commerce platform, it’s easier than ever for a small business or an individual to create an online presence, market private labeled products to the public, house those products in one of Amazon’s warehouses, use Amazon’s shopping cart system to process orders and use Amazon’s logistics and fulfillment capabilities to ship those products. The moral of the story is simple: if a MLM is private labeling a product and does not have the exclusive rights to a formula, the time span between uniqueness and commodity is rapidly shrinking given the low barriers to entry. With MLMs today, it’s imperative to fortify operations with unique and proprietary offerings. When the MLM sales force no longer have unique offerings and instead have to compete on price against an individual leveraging Amazon’s service, Wal Mart or any other big box retailer, they’ll lose. Due to the speed at which people can knock-off products via private labeling, MLMs need to focus on proprietary.

As a MLM lawyer, I often encourage people to lock down proprietary rights early. This includes securing a patent or negotiating an exclusive arrangement from a vendor with a patent. The more fortified your business with exclusive rights, the better positioned your leaders will be in the marketplace. Enjoy the white paper below and tell me what you think..

Amazon White Paper