ITV Ventures sells natural health and beauty products with an affiliate program that has a twist on most. The way it works is you sign up, they run infomercials, and direct calls to the affiliate to close the sale.

This has a few advantages, like lower overhead for them, and the fact an affiliate working for straight comission will be more motivated than a call center cubicle dweller. The fees for this program are substantial however, but lets take a look at the products themselves first before going into that.

First off, these are “all natural” types of products, what that means is there is no active ingredients of any kind. There’s also no scientific proof they work, and the FDA doesn’t review or check on these kind of products like regular ones that have to go through an approval process.

Any claims they do make for these kind of products, is usually to do with the ingredients and “supportive but not conclusive” evidence.
The sales copy for these is hard to write, they want to imply health benefits without making claims that will get them sued by the FDA.

The fact is they don’t provide scientific studies or proof, and you should know this before buying any “natural remedy” because you often pay substantially more than an over the counter type product with active ingredients (i.e. science behind it).

It really boils down to whether they can talk you into buying it on their word it does anything, and of course there’s the credibility problem since they are the ones selling it.

You’ll find a lot of phrases used for these kind of products like “bioavailable” and “wildcrafted” because they hope you won’t know what they mean and they will sound smart.

Bioavailable means that if you ingest it, it will be available to your body. Wildcrafting means it’s picked from trees in the wild, not on a farm. From a marketing point of view it’s very misleading, there’s no ingredients list so don’t look for it on any of their products.

They barrow from every study, and use every name they can when someone did a study of any of the ingredients in a product. They are simply skating on razor-thin ice when it comes to these  health claims.

To be an ITV Ventures independant seller, you’ll be looking at the following fees:

$165 initial payment to be a reseller.

$334 additional for the optional premier package, a random selection of products as well as the above. You don’t get to pick what you get, management decides.

$100 per month if you fail to order at least that much in product every month.

$29.95 per month eductation and training to be in the matrix program. If you don’t pay this, you get no comissions from your downlines, so basically you have to pay it, but they say it’s optional.

$2.95 each month for them to send you a check for bonuses, and $5.95 fee on all transactions (shipping and handling additional) each month. This means annually it’s another $106.80 in fees to get checks and the auto order products.

$99 annually to be in the program in addition to the monthly ones.

Also $59.95 a month to be able to get calls from the infomercial runs, plus up to $35 each call will be charged to you whether they buy anything or not.

This works out to an initial payment of $165 to get you in, the first year you’ll be charged $2583.60 plus at $35 per call from the infomercials, even assuming five calls a day, five days a week, that’s $875 a week or $45,500 annually and if they don’t have a credit card, or don’t order anything you take the loss and pay for the calls anyway. Also, if you don’t buy or sell $100 a month in products for two months, they terminate your membership without notice and you lose all comissions. This certainly is good for them, but for you? Not so good.

As a business, the biggest problem is the ticket price of these, even the cosmetics line is priced higher than even the top commercial brands, and selling overpriced anything in a recession is a huge nightmare. These are not competitive, and with no active ingredients or scientific proof, wow you’ll be pushing your sales skills to their limits.

At least the people calling will be in response to the infomercials, so they will be qualified leads, so there’s some help there. You’ll pay up to $35 for each call, and the risk is all on you if they don’t order.

The real problem above all else is that Kevin Trudeau is invovled with this, you’ll see his line of books included in the product line as well. He’s done prison time for larceny and fraud, been fined and forced to pay millions by the FTC, and if you check the Wikipedia page for him, you’ll see the whole history for deceptive health claims and so on.

In fact he’s specifically banned by the FTC from selling any of these products, that’s why you won’t see him on the management list for this company, Donald Barrett is leading this one, and just having Kevin and his books (under the first amendment he can write those books) involved I believe will be the kiss of death for this company.

Update! As of September 2008 ITV Ventures has closed down. Donald Barrett is starting a new business, EVS Group (Elite Virtual Systems) with similar products but without the MLM business model (no more residuals). They will now let you try to qualify for free calls if you stick to their script and have a good enough closing rate from the 25 they give you. An insider who did ITV said they were closing due to mismanagement. And it looks like the exact same thing, including three of their previous products in the new line.