MLM Software for Small Business

Fewer distributors, the same hard part

Scale changes a lot about this software and it does not change the commission engine. A plan with three components and ranks is the same calculation problem at forty distributors as at forty thousand — just faster to run. Which means the most expensive part of a direct selling platform is the part a small company cannot skip.

That is the shape of the problem. What follows is what to buy and what to leave.

The six things

Enrolment, capturing the agreement version, the income disclosure acknowledgement and the sponsor, on a phone, in a short flow.

Catalogue and orders, with each order classified at entry as retail, preferred customer or distributor personal use. Classification costs nothing now and cannot be reconstructed later.

Genealogy, holding placement and sponsorship as separate structures even if your plan currently uses only one. Adding the second later means reconstructing history you no longer have.

A correct commission run, with preview before posting, and a statement that expands to line level.

Payouts, with thresholds, holds that state their reason, and a record of what was paid against which run.

A distributor view: volume and rank progress, team, statement, money.

That is a functioning direct selling company. Nothing above is optional, and nothing below is needed in month one.

What defers safely, and what does not

The right-hand column has a common property: each item is cheap to build now and expensive or impossible to backfill. You cannot retrospectively determine which of last year’s orders were retail. You cannot produce the version of the agreement a distributor accepted in March if you only ever stored a boolean.

The left-hand column are real features that companies genuinely want, and they are why small companies overspend. A demo is built to show them.

Model the plan before you build it

The most common expensive mistake in a first launch is not a software choice. It is a plan whose total payout exceeds what the product margin supports, discovered in the third month when the run produces a number nobody modelled.

Our plan calculator gives you the payout ratio of a structure before it is anyone’s income. It is worth spending a week on this before spending anything on software, because a plan change after launch is a change to people’s income and is remembered.

The specific arithmetic of how depth compounds cost is worked through on the multi-level marketing software page.

A practical first plan: one structural component, a fast start bonus, and ranks. Add components once the first has run against real volume for a few periods and you know what it costs.

On free and cheap options

Free and open source packages are a reasonable way to learn the domain and a poor way to pay people. The reason is the same one that runs through this page: the plan is specific to you, a package implements somebody else’s, and modifying a commission calculation you did not write — usually without tests around it — is where the saving turns into your engineering time plus the risk of a payout error.

That said, looking is sensible and we would rather you looked with accurate information. The free MLM software and open source pages set out what actually exists, including where it is genuinely usable.

What drives the cost of a build is on the pricing page, with the honest note that we will tell you during scoping if what you have described is smaller than a build justifies.