Market America

Overview

Market America Worldwide, doing business alongside its e-commerce arm SHOP.COM, was founded in 1992 by JR and Loren Ridinger and is headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina. The company describes itself as a product brokerage and one-to-one marketing business that develops its own exclusive brands (spanning health, nutrition, cosmetics, and household categories) while also aggregating third-party retail brands for sale through SHOP.COM's online marketplace. Products are distributed through a network of independent distributors, called "UnFranchise Business Owners," who purchase a startup package, maintain a personal purchase requirement, and operate a company-provided online storefront. The company's own official training materials describe its compensation structure as a binary ("two-leg") plan, formally named the Management Performance Compensation Plan, under which commissions are calculated from balanced sales volume accrued on two sides of a distributor's organization. Market America was briefly a publicly traded company (NASDAQ) starting in 1994 before its founders took it private again in 2001. It has since expanded beyond the United States into a number of additional countries, operating internationally through country-specific SHOP.COM and Market America entities.