Do Clients check this Forum?

Do you know if any Clients check out this Forum? Do they even know we exist here?

Shopping Central Jersey Shoreline. WHAT? I'm an adult?! When did this happen?! How do I make it stop?!

Create an Account or Log In

Membership is free. Simply choose your username, type in your email address, and choose a password. You immediately get full access to the forum.

Already a member? Log In.

I have not heard of such a thing. However, anything is possible.

Happily shopping Rhode Island and nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut
I doubt most clients know this place exists.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/2015 09:23PM by DRJ.
Anyone with an internet connection can search the web. Think about how you found the forum. Did you search for "mystery shopping?" If an employee of a client wants to find out who mystery shops his company and he searches for "mystery shopping," guess what is usually one of the first things that pops up? Yep. Our forum.

Any time you post anything on the forum, understand that it is out there in the open. There should be no expectation of privacy. What we post can be viewed by anyone. And, when someone registers and posts, he can say he is anyone or anything. When you get a PM, the PM-er may or may not identify himself as who he really is.

I have gotten many PMs over the years from new posters asking who shops XXX. When I explain the ICA thing, many ignore and don't respond, some argue, some say "oh, okay" or "thanks anyway," and a couple of times I have gotten back an explanation that they didn't sign an ICA, they are employed by the client and they only want to know who shops their employer. I have also gotten PMs from schedulers asking questions about other MSCs.

You never know who reads here or who is going to post or PM other forum members.
All true with the above posting and the clients receiving ms reports are aware of the msc identity
thereby leaving them vulnerable to employees signing up as shoppers...not good!!!!!!!!
It is easy to find this place for almost any business. Maybe that is why the V forum has stricter rules. Just go to Google, type in your fav business name and mystery shop or secret shopper and see what happens.

We are idiots...
If the admin wanted to, he could easily prevent Google from crawling and indexing this site.

I have a file in the root directory of my website called "robots.txt"

@ wrote:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Then if your running Apache web server, you can also throw in a bit more aggressive, don't index me stuff in the root directory of the website with a file called ".htaccess"

And place this in it:

@ wrote:

#####################################################
##Blocking based on User-Agent Header

SetEnvIfNoCase ^User-Agent$ .*(Googlebot|msnbot|AltaVista|Slurp|Yahoo|craftbot|download|extract|stripper|sucker|ninja|clshttp|spider|leacher|collector|grabber|webpictures) HTTP_SAFE_BADBOT
SetEnvIfNoCase ^User-Agent$ .*(libwww-perl|aesop_com_spiderman) HTTP_SAFE_BADBOT
Deny from env=HTTP_SAFE_BADBOT

#####################################################
## Blocking with RewriteCond

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(Googlebot|msnbot|AltaVista|Slurp|Yahoo|craftbot|download|extract|stripper|sucker|ninja|clshttp|spider|leacher|collector|grabber|webpictures).*$ [NC]
RewriteRule . - [F,L]

This will keep out the bad search engines that don't listen to the robots.txt file that is an agreed way to not place the site in the search engine.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/10/2015 04:07AM by scanman1.
If you think about it, an employee could be really smart and find out when the shoppers are coming in. They could sign up with the company that does the shops for their company. They would then know the dates the shopper could be coming in. Since most shops are open for only a couple of days, they could do everything just perfect on those days!
Years ago when I worked for a major retailer we always were told when the shopper was scheduled to come in. I always thought that defeated the purpose of a "mystery" shop.
@89lulalula89 wrote:

Wouldn't it be easier to just provide excellent customer service?

That just requires too much work. From everyone the managers, supervisors and employees.
@scanman1 wrote:

This will keep out the bad search engines that don't listen to the robots.txt file that is an agreed way to not place the site in the search engine.

I actually found the forum as the result of a Google search, so there ARE positive reasons to keep it showing up.

Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product. Eleanor Roosevelt
I found the forum from the magazine emails. I finally decided to see what it was about and logged on.
I had a store manager ask me how she could get into shopping during a revealed audit, I gave her this place to come and learn.
MelanieOr

We are not idiots, V GOD is, and his site too will pop up when anybody decides to Google anything related to ms.

Yes, that site has stricter rules based on his ego and his cozy relationships with select msc's...real nice of him to allow anybody to read the shopper forum, but shoppers cannot read the scheduler forum. What does that demonstrate about
the moderator of that site??? Plenty....
If any of you remember, a few months ago I posted that I would not be doing anymore of the Reality Check/Sassie Shop grocery store shops because of the exceedingly low payment ($20 - $25 with no reimbursement amount for purchases). The time invested in performing the shop amounted to an hour and the subsequent reports was tedious and time-consuming. Hence, the reimbursement amounted less than what one could to do with other shops of other MSCs. I encouraged other shoppers to do the same. I said I was hoping that the MSC would read the comments and act accordingly.

There was a slight dust-up amongst commenters. Some said they were toggling me.

That is the nature of this discussion group - 8>(

At the end, a commenter who purported to be a Reality Check spokesperson made comments about how their company's reimbursement was inline amongst other MSCs and their shops of the same type.

Therefore, if that person was a representative of the company, then I would suppose that the MSCs do read these comments.

I do note that those particular shops now sit with the scheduler sending out terse E-mails asking for a shopper with some actually being bonused as the deadline date nears.

So perhaps the comments here do get read or at least the shoppers have wised up (hubby's term, not mine).
We know the MSC's are active here; there are a lot of schedulers who post jobs and reply to questions. Some of the MSC execs have also made their presence known.

The question is whether the clients read the boards. i.e. the businesses we are shopping. I would guess there are plenty. I know if I was an employee at a business that was shopped, I'd be very interested about the mystery shopping process, and would eventually find my way here.
Sorry, only registered users may post in this forum.

Click here to login