It is definitely not a mlm.
I have some experience in this, I worked for a company whose owner was taking these courses and built his business exactly this way. Got to the point of selling 500k a month in supplement private label products which was great for his 6 employee outfit.
Problem was like someone mentioned, the rules on Amazon get tweaked and the game changes and you get screwed. They had been trying for a while to diversify their sales channels but it's hard to do so when your main sales channel is Amazon and the customers (data) aren't yours.
I left the company 6 months after getting there because sales were diving big time.