Kannaway is one of the most well-known CBD oil MLMs, partly because they were the first American direct sales company in the CBD oil field. It was also one of the first companies to provide cannabis products to an international audience.
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For those that don’t know, CBD stands for cannabidiol and is one of the main chemicals in marijuana. It is a notable compound, as CBD may offer a variety of health benefits and has no psychoactive properties. In theory, these effects make CBD oil (also called hemp oil) a safe and legal way to get the health advantages that cannabis is meant to offer.
Of course, there is some debate about whether or not CBD oil actually provides the benefits that people suggest. There are other ‘miracle ingredient’ MLMs out there too, like those that focus on the amazing benefits of Aloe Vera, essential oils, Ganoderma, mushrooms, coffee, coconut oil, and the like.
Such companies tend to heavily hype the potential health impacts of their products while offering little scientific evidence to support the claims. There is typically scientific backing to the idea of the product being beneficial, but not nearly enough to prove anything. Consumers will need to decide for themselves whether or not they feel that the products are worth the price.
That being said, the market for CBD oil is heating up. Many people are interested in this type of oil, creating a significant potential to make sales. Kannaway’s long history may be an advantage here, as many other companies haven’t been around long.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty about Kannaway specifically, there is one other thing to be aware of – the competition. The popularity of CBD oil has meant that many companies are entering the marketplace, including other MLMs. To successfully make money with Kannaway, you would need to convince people that Kannaway products are better than the other options on the market.
Two Ways To Make Money With Kannaway
As an MLM, Kannaway offers the chance to earn by selling the products and also by building a team. While these patterns are common enough, each MLM has their own specific requirements and complexities. Kannaway is no exception, which is why this post also considers whether you can reliably earn money through Kannaway.
Make Money From Product Sales
The emphasis of Kannaway is on hemp and its history, and the company promotes the concept of a hemp lifestyle. The product line reflects this, with most of their products containing compounds from cannabis in some way.
This reliance on hemp is most obvious with Kannaway’s CBD oil products. This selection includes the types of products that you’ll find from many CBD oil companies, like CBD oil liquid, CBD oil capsules, and hemp vapes. There are also some less common items, such as Holiday Chocolate Energy Chews and French Roast Coffee (both of which contain CBD oil).
Some of the products seem pricy, like $177.58 (retail) for Pure CBD Liquid. While this oil is more expensive than many other brands, the price point is partly due to the size of the bottle. Even so, there are cheaper CBD oil products out there, some of which may be just as good (or better).
Kannaway does have a broader product selection than many other companies in the CBD oil field. For example, they offer a superfood powder that uses hemp protein, a selection of skincare that relies on hemp and some kemp products for pets. This selection may help distributors to make sales., but the products are still fairly expensive.
Finally, the CBD oil from Kannaway is third-party tested and is extracted using a low-heat process. Both aspects suggest Kannaway’s products are of high quality.
Does CBD Oil Work?
At one point, the marketing for Kannaway heavily focused on hemp and strongly implied that the products functioned in a similar way to marijuana. They’ve stepped down from that marketing angle somewhat and appear much more professional these days.
Even so, Kannaway hardly ever mentions that hemp and CBD oil don’t contain psychoactive compounds. While many people will be aware of this fact, it feels somewhat misleading to not make the information more obvious.
There is some evidence that CBD oil does offer health benefits, but the evidence isn’t nearly as strong as Kannaway would like you to believe. Instead, most studies on the topic have been in animals and it isn’t clear how these apply to humans.
Yes, there are plenty of people that swear on CBD oil, and that’s fine. I understand that it works in some ways, for some people. However, the issue with this company, as with many health and wellness network marketing companies, is that they rely on distributors who are unqualified to make any kind of medical diagnosis or even evaluate their own results properly.
Your buddy might rub CBD oil on his knee and tell you how great it feels. But if the pain relief is not tested properly, i.e. scientifically proven, the “relief” could be due to a number of things. It could be the action of rubbing the knee, or the mental exercise of trying to feel better, or an unintentional change in diet, or even (gasp), a desire for it to work since the person using it is also selling it.
Companies like this make a lot of money because the customers don’t really know whether it works or not. If you have one of the chews or use the vaporizer, you would probably attribute any positive feelings to that. After all, people can convince themselves that sugar pills kill pain, with surprising effectiveness.
Additionally, most of the health benefits that CBD is supposed to offer would be challenging to actually observe (like decreased risk of cancer and reductions in inflammation). Essentially, you could take the products consistently and never know whether they work. This is my main gripe with products like CBD oil – so many of the miracle stories are anecdotal.
Making Money
Distributors for the company are called Kannaway Brand Ambassadors or Independent Distributors. To join you need to pay a fee of $54.98 each year. This provides access to a replicated website, a back office for tracking sales, some training, and support.
Sales can be made through the replicated website or in person, with a commission rate of 30% either way. Selling in person means that you are buying the product at wholesale and then reselling it. The style means that customers get the item immediately and are able to see what they purchase. While those aspects can help to promote sales, the purchase first model also creates more risk for the distributor.
Make Money Building A Team
As always, the other earning approach is to build a team. The compensation plan for Kannaway gets complicated quickly and there are multiple different levels, bonuses, schemes, and factors to consider.
The first aspect is that there is a minimum monthly requirement to earn from your team. You need to make 110 Personal Volume (PV) of sales every month to earn from your team. Using terminology like PV is common for an MLM, but it is also frustrating.
For one thing, the PV approach makes it difficult to calculate the financial total of the sales that you need to make. Without knowing this, it isn’t possible to gauge how difficult the monthly target is to meet. Kannaway also avoids providing much information about how volume relates to dollar amounts until after people sign up for the company.
Kannaway tries to make it sound like the recruiting aspect isn’t a big deal with the following claim.
All this means is that distributors don’t earn money from the membership fee of people they recruit. But… they do earn money from the salespeople they recruit make.
How much money depends on their own rank, the rank of the people they recruit, how much product is being sold, the legs of the distributor’s business, the matching bonuses in place, the team override bonus, the differential infinity bonus, and many other aspects.
Does that sound complicated yet?
I got lost about halfway through the compensation plan, and I have read a lot of compensation plans for MLMs. In reality, the plan is too complicated for most members to be able to understand it, let alone follow it.
The main aspect is that you’re earning percentage commissions based on where people fall in your downline. This means that the team under you needs to be making a significant amount of sales. You also need multiple generations under you. It isn’t enough to recruit someone. Your recruits need to be recruiting too, as do their recruits and so on.
Getting a structure like this to work in practice is no easy feat. You’ll often find that your recruits end up competing against one another and you. The pool for potential customers and recruits often dries up fast too, as many people are targeting the same general audience.
There is one other interesting part that is worth mentioning. Kannaway offers a Minimum Income Guarantee (MIG), which is a very unusual idea.
The figures sound amazing, but there are some serious limitations too:
- MIG commissions only start at the Executive Direct rank. This is the fourth rank in the commission scheme and many distributors won’t ever get that far.
- You still need to hit the 110 PV goal with sales to get the guaranteed income.
- You also need to have at least three active distributors in your downline. These must be in separate legs and they need to hit the 110 PV goal as well.
So, even with the so-called guaranteed income, you need to hit a minimum amount of sales every single month. Targets like this suck because life simply isn’t predictable. There may be some months where people are reluctant to buy and others where you don’t have much time to put into promoting Kannaway.
The end result is that Kannaway’s compensation plan is difficult to understand and even more challenging to optimize. Don’t be fooled by the number of bonuses that they offer. Each of them has complex requirements. You’ll typically find that only the high ranking members get a chance at most bonuses.
Can You Generate Reliable Income With Kannaway?
The Kannaway Review
Products
Business Opportunity
Final Review
With the current popularity of CBD oil, Kannaway does have potential as a way to make a reliable income. To do so, you'd need to have a customer base that is interested in this type of product. It would also be important to expand your audience over time.
Is this possible? Certainly. Just be aware that you're focusing on some pretty expensive products and there are many other CBD oil companies (and distributors!) out there.
Can you convince people that the products from Kannaway are better than other brands? What about people that don't currently use hemp products? Could you talk them into buying items from Kannaway regularly? Selling products directly in this manner isn't as easy as it sounds. Even if you're promoting an amazing product that has no equal, in-person sales are tough.
Recruiting people into a company is harder still. You have to convince people to invest their time and money into the company. To make money from your recruits, they also have to be effective at selling the product. Most of the people that join the company probably won’t be very effective at sales – after all, it isn’t an easy task. Relying on other people to be motivated is one of the most annoying things about network marketing in my opinion.
If you are passionate about CBD oil, as many of the commenters on this post are, that's fine! You are perfectly OK to sell products from this company as long as you believe in them. But just realize that you are not an "independent business owner" (IBO). You are a salesperson for a company. Don't fall into the idea that you are running your own business, because if Kannaway decides they don't like your selling methods, or if Kannaway has any issues down the road, your business could crumble overnight.
Update:
The amount of whiners in the comments about my critiques of this company is incredible. Personally, I believe that CBD oil definitely has some potential use cases for pain relief! I have nothing against CBD oil or people that use it. My main issue is that network marketing people selling the product do so in an unethical, and non-science-based way. This is very much like any other kind of "miracle cure" out there where someone has a good experience with it, then recommends it to everyone for everything.
If you like it, great. Use CBD oil. That doesn't mean you have to sell it and recruit more sellers to your team.
MLM Critic & Author: Nathaniell
What's up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. I have to be honest though. I'm not a big fan of MLM. Tried it. Hated it.
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Cierra
Nathaniell, WE HAVE EXPERIENCED THE EVIL OF “CBD SNAKE OIL” FIRST HAND. But this brand of CBD I promise is legitimate high quality CBD! These people with their testimonies aren’t “the company making claims” That company makes no medical claims. I understand if you are a healthy person you may not notice the benefits of CBD. And you can say whatever you want about this company, its your page. However if anyone wants to know my extensive experience with CBD, including being sold “snake oil” then read on. There is no way it can be a placebo affect for me because I’m not the one taking it, my toddler is, and has taken different brands of CBD since he was an infant. He is severely mentally handicapped and cannot speak, so cannot “LIE” about how much the CBD is helping him. His DAILY SEIZURE COUNT speaks for the CBD!! He was born having 200-300 seizures per day due to a rare gene mutation that makes his brain constantly mis-fire, no cure. The children’s hospital tried 10 different seizure medications and he still kept right on with 200-300 seizures per day. They finally basically gave up and sent us home when he was 5 months old having us just sedate him 3-4 times a day so he (and we) could rest. I have tried about 5 different forms of CBD for my sons severe and terminal form of Epilepsy. The first 2 did nothing and WERE SNAKE OIL! They were lab tested to contain almost NO CBD in them, mostly just vegetable glycerin. Showing that regulation of CBD is needed, and currently you have to be careful where you get it. Then finally he had some custom made for him at a dispensary(not this brand) and within 2 weeks (FOR THE FIRST TIME) his seizures quickly came down from 200-300 per day down to around 10-20 per day. Huge quick decrease. Since then,because we hoped to get his seizure count even lower, we tried another 3 brands of CBD, all of which are well known right now, some of which have been in the news for helping kids with seizures, they all DID WORK at keeping his seizures around 10 per day, never going back up to 300. But once I started him on THIS brand of CBD 2 months ago, this is the lowest his seizures have ever been, 3-5 per day. So we’ve seen that it works. And CBD cannot be denied as working when 10 prescriptions failed, it was such blatant evidence. I realize you may chose not to approve this comment, and that would be your choice. I just hope you read this for your information. Of course you can also chose not to believe me. But why on earth would THOUSANDS of mothers of children with seizures, just “lie” about how extremely effective CBD is as a treatment for it. The legitimate scientific HUMAN research on CBD is growing so your information about it only being tested on animals is so wrong. I personally now 2 other kids with my sons rare diagnosis that are part of LEGITIMATE MEDICAL studies taking CBD that has helped them both a lot! Regardless of any supposed “grey area” (which really isn’t true cuz just last year the federal courts ruled that he DEA my not spend any resources towards cannabinoids derived from industril hemp, and made the law clear that HEMP and its derivatives are not a schedule1 drug). I don’t think CBD will be “cracked down on” or taken away by the government unless they decide to make it into a prescription drug, which would be both good and bad. More affordable if insurance covers it, but making no one be able to access this harmless medicine without a prescription.
Cathy
I also am a cancer patient. CBD from Hemp is not strong enough to help. You need the CBD from marijuana.
There is a difference in where the CBD oil is coming from and Hemp is a waste of money for cancer patients.
elaine
Cathy, My sincere wishes for your success in your bout with cancer. CBD is inherent in both MJ and in hemp – MJ is much higher in THC than CBD and hemp much higher in CBD than MJ. As with anything else, plants are grown for their cannabinoid potency whether CBD or THC.
I’m sure you’ve researched and found that feeding the ECS with therapeutic CBD has tremendous benefit for all health conditions and that your body will utilize all forms of CBD whether plant based or the ones your body internally makes to gain optimal health. I’m sure you have also visited the site below to confirm that cannabinoids and cannabidiol has had promising results and that implementing CBD from either MJ or hemp is equal since they are both from the cannabis genome.
I am also sure since you’ve done your research that the statement above must have been a mistake as CBD from the cannabis plant only varies with the strain of the plant itself and not because its MJ or hemp. Wishing you all the best and success overcoming!
Elaine
Seems the whole discussion revolves around your business model – that’s fine, everyone is entitled to make a buck. However, your “assessment” of this company is based on outdated information, pricing etc, so as far as your expert opinion goes – it doesn’t go very far.
There is no “gray area” of the law regarding CBD, hemp or MJ, the law is the law and so far it appears that no one has evaded or broke the law in the making or selling of any of the companies products.
Good luck on your business enterprise, and remember the old saying:
You know how you make yourself look good? Make the other person look bad.
Nathaniell
“the DEA reiterated that all cannabis extracts, including CBD, are considered Schedule I substances”
“CBD laws vary from state to state, and while the DEA considers it illegal under federal law, CBD products remain available for sale in health supplement shops and organic food stores around the country—though some of them might not contain all that much CBD”
Source
elaine
Again, please do not lump marijuana and hemp together as they are completely separate.
Ruling states that CBD extracted from hemp aerial parts (bud and leaf) is still Schedule 1 – CBD extracted from seed and stem/stalk w/less than .3% THC present is LEGAL federally. Below are the actual references, not an article or some other random opinion – so please correct your statements above and set the record straight. Also there are over 25k studies on CBD and its health benefits whether the CBD is from hemp or MJ.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/134/actions
https://www.thehia.org/resources/Documents/Legal/HIA-v-DEA-9th-Circuit-Motion.pdf
http://www.votehemp.com/PDF/2016-CONGRESS-Hemp-Update.pdf
http://www.echoconnection.org
HempQueen
Nataniell your facts are all out of line. CBD does all the things the people say it does. The anecdotal evidence is huge and the clinical evidence is mounting in favor of full spectrum cannabinoids. FYI, the DEA doesn’t make or interpret the laws. And they can’t do anything about CBD with < .3% THC that is made from industrial hemp, that particular strain is not considered a narcotic. Hemp in those strengths are classified as a food source by the FDA when made into indigestible oils. Hemp is legal my friend. Get the facts before you bash good people.
Nathaniell
With a name like Hemp Queen, I’m sure you’re an unbiased source of information.
If you like CBDs, that’s fine. I have nothing against them personally. But selling them under the pretense of being a cure-all, as many IBOs do, is not good for the customer. People should know all sides of the story.
Truthiracy
Nathaniel you’re an assumptive prick who creates uncertainty to products that help veterans. Real peice of *hit you are.
There is now much scientific evidence available that CBD products work and work well. What ***king planet are you living on? Go climb out from a rock or wp development and go read science or check the sources of the scientific journals that have published the findings.
You think every state and the country of Canada just want people to get high all day or have you forgotten that these special cannabinoids are the only reason why ANY legalization is happening.
Its not for rec cannabis. This isn’t ***king Amsterdam.
You probably don’t even know that every human is BUILT with an endocannbinoid system, proving the human body was designed from beginning to consume cannabinoids.
Nathaniell
I don’t think I said anything about all those things you mentioned. I’m pro marijuana legalization, for medical and recreational. However, Kannaway’s health benefits are still dubious IMO.
Courtney
Although I think your business standpoint of this article is really insightful, I have to disagree with you about the quality and effectiveness of the product. I have a rare form of lymphoma (SPTCL) and use CBD solely as treatment and it really does work. I had non-radiation chemotherapy twice but my disease overpowered it each time. CBD works for me and it doesn’t destroy healthy cells in your body like chemotherapy does. Chemo does not target cancer but instead the entire body, and I much prefer the incredible effects of CBD then any other treatment or medicine I’ve tried for the last 8 years (I’m 21).
Aside from that, I do appreciate your perspective on the the business side because I am considering joining a team.