This is beyond grasping at straws.<p>Shopify performs a service, Herbalife does not. Shopify recruits people, Herbalife sells inventory.<p>I don't see Shopify asking for upfront payments from their affiliates.<p>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).<p>There is literally no similarities between Shopify and HerbaLife beyond a program recruiting people, which basically every large site has.
I can't help but laugh at the irony of the copywriting style, is this meant to appeal to the same kind of clueless audience that calls numbers for MLM-scheme posters stapled to telephone poles? If so, to what end?
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem with Herbalife. The problem with Herbalife is that it is a pyramid scheme. You don’t make your money by selling products, you make it by recruiting people to sell for you, who recruit people to sell for them, and so on.<p>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.<p>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.
> Google search shopify and millionaire and you'll see 27k results. Then go to Youtube and enter shopify and millionaire and you'll see 10k results.<p>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.<p>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.
I've never heard of this Citron Research group. However, anytime a company tries to sell something as a "lifestyle" or other cult like mentalities, you know something sketchy is going on.<p>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