I am new to this but have completed 4 shops for another company.
I accepted a credit union shop with a different company for this coming Friday.
Yesterday I get the following email

I am sorry but I am going to have to drop you from the XXX Credit Union assignment that you picked up. It dropped off a shopper’s board accidentally. But I will keep your name in mind and next month there will be more shops available. Just for our records, do you have an account with XXX?

Should I tell them to shove it? Is this something that happens a lot? Just for the record my tolerance level for BS is low so I do on occasion tell people /companies to shove it if I think I am getting the jerk around and I have no problems with that.

Also
I had another shop in that area ready to go and now it is hardly worth the effort and travel for that alone.
It is with intelli-shop who I now understand take very long to pay! Slow plays rank right up there with jerk arounds in my book.

When I agree to do something it is important to keep my commitment but seeing as this is a slow pay company and it appears that some of these companies have no problem reneging on there end should I reject the Intelli-shop commitment? Either way I doubt I will do any future shops for this company

There are the occasional mishaps in scheduling. I remember having lined up a bunch of junk shops to go around a sweet job. Two days before the shop I get the email that the client has decided to pull the shop. Can't prove a thing whether they did or didn't. Left me with a long trip for a bunch o' junk shops. I was not happy.

What I have found is that a little reminder sometimes helps. I respond to such an email indicating, "Can you go on and queue me up for the job next time it is offered?" I've always had decent response.

It is not something I have seen often. More often what I see are changes to job parameters. An in person shop magically turns into a cheap phone shop, photos or other proofs get changed between acceptance and payment (some times AFTER performance and reporting), and similar types of nonsense. Most of the time they are easy enough to deal with.

Intellishop is far from my favorite company to work with precisely because of the long wait time for payment. Generally I will consider shops that do not have a large out of pocket expense, but even these I hesitate because of the scheduled long payment. As far as I know, they pay on schedule, it is the schedule that is awful.

I've enjoyed working for Intellishop. They don't have much in my area. They do take a long time to pay, but not so long that I have given up on them. And they do pay on schedule without me having to contact them and beg for the money. When companies make me contact them to ask to be paid, I tend not to want to work for them anymore...... I would give them another chance if I were you. Fun shops, reasonable report forms, reasonable editing.

The best laid plans, Bubblesandme, can fall apart. If it were me, I would go ahead and do the Intellishop. The fact that your schedule fell apart, is not of their making. They have shops that I like, and yes pay is a long time getting to me - but it gets to me when they say it will.

Route building is great, when it works.

I shop for them, too. They have some I like, and some I avoid. One fine dining client (that is not now shopped) had the report from h***. Some have simple reports. Most want longer narratives. They pay when they say they will pay, which is long, but always on time.

**********************************************************************
“Making mistakes simply means you are learning faster.”
~Weston Agor

Well, if you are getting punched in the jaw, at least it means that you are in the ring, as they say. Yes, plans fall apart, often because of the client pulling the shop, sometimes because the MSC personnel screwed up, sometime because the creek was rising and the bridge was washed out. (No joke there!) From what I see on various sites, there are a few schedulers who seem to cancel more shops than happenstance can account for. Other than those, it's usually just a matter of bad breaks. I just had a whole route, except for the site furthest from me, fall apart. But, I will do 160 miles RT to do that shop. The company that dropped the other shops is not the one that scheduled the remaining one, and my word is my bond. Becoming known among schedulers as reliable is essential if you want to be sought out for those special, and better paid, opportunities.

I got a convience store set up for that area now and have a lunch plus 5 bucks shop set up on the way home so should work out.
Still not happy about the getting paid 3 months from now part but live and learn.

And the learning curve in mystery shopping is pretty fast all in all :)