Hi Shoppers!

My husband and I recently purchased 100% of the shares of ACE Mystery Shopping that were previously held by my business partner, Tiffany Stewart.

Since my new position encompasses all of the accounting tasks previously handled by my former partner, I have made a few changes to streamline the process. From here going forward, you will receive a check for mystery shops, instead of Dwolla. I know we have expected shoppers to jump through all kinds of hoops to get their money. First it was PayQuicker, then Dwolla. We feel that there is better accountability for checks and we can process them much more efficiently, without asking shoppers to share their private information online. I think you will be pleased with this decision because on a daily basis, we get emails from shoppers asking if they can be paid by check.

I started this business in 2001, along with Tiffany Stewart, so I can assure you that you will continue to receive the same personal attention from our staff as always! Erika and I are holding down the fort here at our office and we both welcome your feedback. Feel free to call any time to speak with either of us directly.

We sincerely appreciate your participation! As a shopper, you are a vital role in the success of our company!


Thanks!

Julie Simbro
www.acemysteryshopping.com
866.240.7324 Office

Great news. I closed my account with Ace because of PayQuicker. I'll be sure to sign up again!

That's great! If you want to email support@acemysteryshopping.com we can just reactivate you if you want. That way, you don't have to go through the trouble of signing up again.

Best of luck to you Julie! How long after the shop will the check be mailed?

Good question! We will try have all checks mailed by the 15th of the following month (or first business day after if it occurs on a weekend). Since it takes longer for to process checks, we will begin processing them around the 3rd of the month, once all shops are in. This means that some will be mailed out well before the 15th. I do want to mention though, that we are considered one of the smaller mystery shopping companies. We are lucky to have awesome clients that pay us on time every month. This is very important to us because as a smaller company, we do rely on our clients to pay on time so we can pay the shoppers in a timely manner. We are hoping that as we grow, our cash flow will allow us to pay even more often. We would love to pay within 2 weeks - that is our goal. Not sure how fast we'll get there but we'll keep you posted!

Thank you Julie. Timely pay is indeed important--we, too are business owners, so we understand. Just as important, however, is open, honest communication from the MSC and its staff. You are definitely taking the lead in this, and I want to thank you for that. As soon as I shovel the current stack of reports off of my desk I will be taking a new look at your company to see if there is a shop I can "test drive." By coming here and posting openly, you have convinced me to give ACE second chance.

Well, I am IN! I did not like the payquicker and stopped working for ACE quite a while ago... Glad to hear!

Pay Quicker worked well for me. Dwolla...I had no clue about where my money was.

If you can email us at support@acemysteryshopping.com, we can definitely check to see if there were any unclaimed payments owed to you and get them out to you right away. We want to make sure our shoppers are taken care of and encourage anyone who has questions to contact us. I love the new direction we are headed with Julie leading us! To all of the shoppers out there, thank you for all you do! I appreciate it more than you know!

Erika Wooton
Vice President, Operations & Project Management
ACE Mystery Shopping
866-240-7234
support@acemysteryshopping.com

I will be taking another look as well. I don't mind checks, they arrive at my house with no prompting from me. I like that in a payment. Last time I looked at the ACE job board there wasn't enough in my area to convince me to do DWOLLA, whatever that is. However, I don't mind how small a check is. I love getting money in the mail.

Best of luck to you!

I will continue to shop for ACE, but I prefer companies that use Paypal or Direct Deposit. The mailing of checks is "old school" and there is always the danger of the check being lost in the mail.. I have had this happen in the past with other companies and it is a hassle to get a replacement check plus a long delay. Also with Paypal/Direct Deposit, there can never be a question if the payment was processed or not.

Anything's better than PayQuicker and Dwolla, even paper checks. Thank you!!

It was a tough decision switching to checks. Starting in October, we mailed checks out to shoppers for September shops and then again this month for October shops. We didn't want to make the official announcement right away because we wanted to see how it worked.

I am quite pleased with the United States Postal Service! Out of almost 2,000 checks, we only received about SIX back that were not deliverable. We simply contacted the shoppers and sent a new ones out as soon as they provided us with their new address.

When we used PayPal (for a brief time in 2003, I think), PayQuicker and Dwolla, each month we would get hundreds of payments kicked back to us after the shoppers didn't claim their money - mainly because they didn't know how. When we used Direct Deposit, we had many errors (shoppers gave us wrong routing and account numbers). Each error that we got, we had to track down the correct account information, in addition to a $10.00 fee our bank charged us for attempting to make a deposit into the wrong account. It was an accounting nightmare trying to keep the books straight with the method used by our previous accounting staff. There are still a few messes we are trying to clean up. The way we see it, everyone knows how to sign the back of a check and deposit/cash it. There is no learning curve and we don't have the responsibility of teaching people how to get paid.

Before I acquired the other half of the company, our accounting department received numerous emails every day from shoppers asking where their payment was. Since we switched to checks, I can't even remember when the last email I got from a shopper asking about payment. It feels really good. Checks give us something tangible to hold when a check didn't make it to a shopper. While it may seem "old school" checks integrate nicely with our accounting software and make our company more efficient and streamlined.

Thanks!

Julie Simbro
ACE Mystery Shopping
866.240.7324

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/18/2015 04:55PM by JulieACE.

I received a check from you this week and wondered what was up. I'm glad to catch up and read your news! I love working with you guys.

How can I apply?

I never liked Payquicker. I always called it Pay Slower. If I remember correctly, before Pay Quicker, ACE was paying me by directly depositing the payment into my checking account. All Payquicker did was add another step to the process of getting paid. The money would go into Payquicker. I would then have to access the Payquicker account and tell it to transfer the money to my checking account. So the money would end up in the same place, but it would take longer to get there.

I have four outstanding payments for four fast food shops. I didn't realize you didn't send checks and thought you were way behind in payments. I have the dates of the shops and the amounts which I will forward to you. I have to go through tons of papers to see if I can find the shops. Thanks for the heads up and good luck with your new endeavor.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2015 12:25AM by Lorrie68.

Definitely contact us, so we can look into that for you! You can email me at support@acemysteryshopping.com and I will try to look into it this weekend and get back to you, but if not this weekend, for sure Monday.

Thank you and have a great weekend!

Erika Wooton
Vice President, Operations & Project Management
ACE Mystery Shopping
www.acemysteryshopping.com
866-240-7324

If the check is lost in route who has to cover the replacement?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/22/2015 04:47AM by BusyB223.

Good to hear, but there is very little work in my area - mainly menu audits. Hopefully, you will pick up new accounts as well.

Julie, I am not signed up with ACE but may consider it. Do you ever have phone shops? Phone shops work best for me. Thanks and good luck!

If you have work in Albuquerque (or surrounding), I'm in!

Julie, this is good news!

It's the 20th and my check hasn't arrived. I hate snail mail. I have major issues with the post office. Horrible service. At least with payquicker or Dwolla I could track. Right now I have no idea if my check was ever mailed. Really, enough to make me quit Ace. I like the shops but I have had so many problems with the post office and missing payments. Just such a hassle. Hoped to be doing a little
Shopping this weekend but I guess not.
I don't understand how cutting and mailing paper checks can possibly be financially efficient at all. That's so yesterday. Please. I have 8 different companies using PayPal for payments to me weekly with no issues at all. Sorry. I'm not happy about this development I decided I would just go with it and see how it works and guess what? It doesn't. No check in my mail. So now what? I have to wait another week or two to get it replaced?
Not acceptable. Sorry.

We will not be asking shoppers to cover the cost of replacement checks if they get lost.

@ErikaAce wrote:

Definitely contact us, so we can look into that for you! You can email me at support@acemysteryshopping.com and I will try to look into it this weekend and get back to you, but if not this weekend, for sure Monday.

Thank you and have a great weekend!

Erika Wooton
Vice President, Operations & Project Management
ACE Mystery Shopping
www.acemysteryshopping.com
866-240-7324

My Mistake: The copy of your check was in the wrong file and I just found a payment for three shops that were paid 5-6 months after the shops. I'm not sure about the fourth shop which I listed in the email I sent to you.

@alinosi wrote:

It's the 20th and my check hasn't arrived. I hate snail mail. I have major issues with the post office. Horrible service. At least with payquicker or Dwolla I could track. Right now I have no idea if my check was ever mailed. Really, enough to make me quit Ace. I like the shops but I have had so many problems with the post office and missing payments. Just such a hassle. Hoped to be doing a little
Shopping this weekend but I guess not.
I don't understand how cutting and mailing paper checks can possibly be financially efficient at all. That's so yesterday. Please. I have 8 different companies using PayPal for payments to me weekly with no issues at all. Sorry. I'm not happy about this development I decided I would just go with it and see how it works and guess what? It doesn't. No check in my mail. So now what? I have to wait another week or two to get it replaced?
Not acceptable. Sorry.

I'm really sorry you don't like receiving checks. We learned a long time ago that we cannot please everyone all the time. We have to do what is best financially for the overall health and efficiency of our company. We were not operating as efficiently as we needed to under the past accounting management and we are working towards making everything so much better. The electronic payments were difficult to track when we would receive hundreds of rejected payments each month. I'm pretty sure that even if we said we would hand deliver checks to shoppers the day after the shop, we would probably still not be able to satisfy everyone. That's just the way it goes when you are dealing with thousands of contractors.

Remember, as a mystery shopper, you are a business owner. You have your own little mystery shopping company and the mystery shopping providers are essentially YOUR customers. Please don't take this wrong - because this isn't my intent - but as a business owner yourself, try imagine someone from our staff saying that to one of our clients that you shop. Again, I didn't mean to say that to sound harsh but I wanted you to think about it from our perspective.

Please send an email to julie@acemysteryshopping.com and I can check and see when your payment was made and verify that we have the correct address.

Thanks!

Julie Simbro
ACE Mystery Shopping

We do have phone shops on occasion!

@alinosi wrote:

I don't understand how cutting and mailing paper checks can possibly be financially efficient at all.

The price of cutting a paper check and mailing it.... less than $1.00
The price of a bounced direct deposit.... $10.00
The value of a little tact... Priceless

Do you have shops in. The Atlanta Metro