What is Empowr.com? – Is Empowr.com a legit online income opportunity?

If you have done your research on the internet looking to find out is Empowr.com a scam or legit, you probably found numerous posts praising Empowr and numerous posts bashing Empowr, leaving you completely confused. In this post, you won’t find praising for Empowr.com or bashing the program. You will find my objective opinion about Empowr.com supported by the reasons lead me to that conclusion. Hence, you are able to validate the reasons which lead me to my conclusion to your case.
But first things first…

What is Empowr.com?

In a nutshell, Empowr.com is just another social network (like Facebook) combined with an online income opportunity. Which looks like a very lucrative idea – get paid for what you are already doing for free on other social networks – posting and liking others posts. But there are some red flags attached to this online business opportunity which put this program on the edge of a scam and definitely not worth your time and money if your purpose is making money online.

If your only purpose is to socialize on another social network like Facebook, without taking advantage of the online income opportunity, you can definitely check out this platform. Just make sure you are not entering your credit card or PayPal account details AND NOT ‘optimizing’ your account. As I will explain further on this post, you might be automatically charged due to the activities you do on the platform.

Compensation Plan

How do you get paid on Empowr.com?

Please note that you are getting paid with “virtual money” and in order to cash out your “virtual money” to “real money” you need to let your earning “mature” for 90 days. Which mean Empowr holds your earning for 90 days. This is RED FLAG #1. It’s acceptable to hold earnings in order to compensate sales that have refund option or “money back guarantee”. But in this case Empowr offer neither of them, they just hold your money…

RED FLAG #2 – Empowr will ask you to clear out your balance first before they will pay you your “matured” money, which makes sense and acceptable. The problem is they are not willing to deduce it from your money and they will ask for your credit card. As you can see from the picture below – I need to pay $5778.54 with my credit card in order to receive $83.7. They are not willing to deduce the $5778.54 from my ‘not yet fully matured’  $7079.07 earnings paying me only the difference.

Here is the list of activities which will earn you money on the Empowr network:

• Sale something on the platform.

You can advertise and sell a product or a service on the platform like on Amazon and eBay. Please note that you’ll be charged for advertising fee if you make the sale or not, and a transaction fee of %10 if you make the sale.

• Advertise and sell other people’s products.

If you don’t have products of your own to sale, Empowr lets you sponsor other people advertisement of their products on the platform. If a sale is made after clicking on an ad that you have sponsored you will get a commission. Yet, the amount of the commission or how it’s calculated is unclear.

• Get paid when your posts are being ‘liked’ and your videos are being watched.

Please note that you’ll be paid for those activities only for the first 24 hours after publishing your post/video.

• Complete your daily tasks to receive a bonus.

Each member gets daily targets for 4 basic activities – Posting, Sharing other’s posts (aka “closing the loop” on Empowr terminology), Listing a product for sale and Bidding on others products. The number of posts, shares, lists, and bids vary depending on your rank.

How much does it cost?

Joining Empowr.com network is free and you’ll even receive $20 in virtual money to start with. Which you can utilize for the different activities fee. But from here on, if you are in for the online income opportunity, everything will cost you money.

Here is the list of activities that will cost you money:

• Advertising fee

Advertising your product or service will cost you money. You can set the budget and the period.

• Advertising credit fee

If you choose not to add “real money” to your account (to be used for advertising for example), Empowr will credit you with ‘Advertising Credit’ that you’ll be able to use for advertising on the platform. Simply put, this is a line of credit. And as for every line of credit, when you take advantage of it, it becomes a loan, and for every loan, there is also an interest to pay. On Empowr.com this is called ‘Advertising credit fee’ (not to be confused with advertising fee) and it is calculated as a percentage of your utilized advertising credit.

• Power User subscription

You can upgrade your account and become a “Power User”. Basically, what’s it means is paying a monthly subscription for a rank for getting higher commissions. These monthly payments start with few dozens $ but very fast climb to $100’s and even $1000’s. You can set the rank that you are interested in BUT, if you have “optimized” your account, Empowr will automatically upgrade your account once your earning are sufficient. Deducing the amount from your earning AUTOMATICALLY!

If you are not interested in the auto upgrade, and you have noticed that such charge has been made, you have 3 days (as for writing this post) to ask for a refund.

• Cost of purchased items

One of your daily tasks is to bid on others items. Please bear in mind that if your bid wins, you will actually need to pay for the item and the shipment.

Compensation Verdict: not worth your time and highly risking your money. Score: 2/10

Education/Training

• First Resource

When you register, you’ll be taken thru a series of short video clips which are basic training on the platform and cover the general idea. Those are very basic training, and some of them are outdated (since the screenshots in the video clips are not the same as the current desktop system).

• Second Resource

Your second resource for education and guiding is your ‘success coach’. Once you join, you are being assigned with a ‘success coach’. Success coaches are users that chose to become a coach on the platform for other users by passing exams to validate their knowledge on the platform. I’ve been a user on the platform for approximately 6 months and I’ve had few different success coaches. What I’ve noticed is that beyond the basic questions of “how to do what”, they actually couldn’t help me much…

In some point I’ve decided to become a success coach myself, hoping that it will give me a better understanding of the platform. This is a very simple process – you will get a series of posts to read and learn and then you’ll have to pass a test combined from series of closed questions (choosing the correct answer). I gave up on that process after I’ve noticed that the questions on the tests are not related to the material on the posts. For example, In one case the posts were on advertisement rules and questions were on the compensation plan?!

• Third Resource

Your third resource for education is the help/support site which is actually a set of manuals. But again also, in this case, it is outdated and lacking crucial information. For example, when one of my add’s was rejected with the reason it is not aligned with the guidelines. I’ve double checked the manual looking to find out what is wrong, but with no success… After reaching to my ‘success coach’ he gave me the reason (not using camelcase notation for the headline!?) which is not documented in the manual! And that was only one example…

Education Verdict: Lacking and outdated. Score: 3/10

Support

Slim to none. You can write to the support team for issues that you have on your account. I’ve done it few times but received almost no reply. In the few cases, I did receive a reply that was a generic message, something like “we’ll investigate and get back to you…”, which didn’t happen…

You can involve your success coach and ask him/her to escalate (which I did), since they have a weekly meeting with their success coach, and so on. And the higher level has a meeting with the management. So if there is a repeating issue with several users, that can be escalated thru them… theoretically.

Support Verdict: Slim to none. Score: 1/10

Pros

1. Very novel mission. As stated on the Empowr.com site:
   

   “Our mission: To empower people by enabling opportunity, hope and influence

   Our goal: To help half the planet (4 billion people) earn an average of $25 per day by the year 2025.“

2. The basic main concept of getting paid for what we are all doing for free on other social network and giving back 97% of the platform revenue back to the community is very lucrative and appreciated. The problem is in the execution…
   .
3. The idea of “closing the loop” (aka engaging) with other users is again, very appreciated. And again…the problem is in the execution…
   .
4. In contrary to what is written in other blog posts, I don’t think that there are “hidden fees”. The problem is that people usually don’t read the Terms of Service or the FAQ or even not checking the minimum basic training. Which I recommend doing for all online income opportunities that you examine. Anyhow, in the case of Empowr.com, although some of the fees are not quite clear how they are calculated they do state upfront very clearly for which activities on the platform you are going to be charged.
   .
5. They do offer a refund for unwanted “upgrades” that may be initiated by mistake. And they do state that if you choose to close your account, even if you haven’t cleared your balance, you owe them anything:

Cons

1. You can not cash out your earning for 90 days. Combined with the fact that once certain amount reaches 90 days it’ll be consumed by your daily bids, you will be left with very little to cash out.
   .
2. You cannot pay your fee’s with “unmatured” money, hence you need to pay with “hard cash money (credit card or PayPal).
   .
3. You cannot clear your balance with your “un-matured” money. You need to pay with “hard cash” money in order to cash out your money. Which can reach up to $1000’s to pay and receive back in order to earn few $100’s That demands a lot of trust on the system that they indeed will pay you back after you pay them.
   .
4. Compensation calculation is very unclear. Hence, you cannot calculate how much you’ll earn or even really know if indeed your were paid correctly.
   .
5. The platform is very buggy. For example – after completing the daily tasks (and shown on the dashboard) for being eligible to receive the bonus, after few days it showed I didn’t complete the daily tasks…and it happened more than once. I’ve opened a ticket but received no reply.
   .
6. Support almost does not exist.
   .
7. Training is very basic and outdated.

Final Verdict

I’m writing this with a great sorrow but after trying it for almost 6 months, I DO NOT recommend this program as an online income opportunity. The reason I’m writing this with a great sorrow is that I really appreciate the main idea of “by the people for the people” and sharing the revenue that is generated on the social platforms with the peoples that actually contribute for that. And it seems like the Empowr team have put a great deal of effort in order to make this happen.

But, as you have noticed from my detailed review above, this system is still lacking in execution and implementation of these ideas. It is full of bugs, the compensation plan is very unclear and the main two ideas of holding your money for 90 days and asking for “real money” in order to bail out your earning is very shady and can be seen as a scam.

I understand the need for “pouring in” real money in order for this to be a real business opportunity and not just elaborated game, but I think the way they are doing it is very shady, and there are better ways to achieve this goal.

The two reasons I do not see this program as a scam are:

1. They don’t hide the fee’s they are going to charge you. It is very explicit even on the basic training.
2. They will give you a refund (for a limited time) in case you unintentionally set your account to be charged automatically for the power user program. And they will also clear your balance if you decide to close your account.

If you have been (or still) a “citizen” on the Empowr.com network, would love to hear what you think about this platform from your experience. Just write it in the comments below.