@rosaestanli wrote:

You all are lucky..Los Angeles area isn't looking so good.

I think that not everybody sees the same shops posted. New shoppers do not see as much. The more shops a shopper does, and the more successfully he completes them, the more different shops he sees. By doing a good job for them, you will see more opportunities.

I know this to be true. They have an internal rating system, and if you do your reports on time, give comments for all "no" answers, etc. you will have a good internal rating and be able to view more shops.

Look next month for Long Beach. I always see a lot there.

@rosaestanli wrote:

I have done two shops with them. One was $5 and reimburse. Another was $20 and reimbursement. What gets me is that in my area I only see shops for the same vendor over and over. Every single month it's pizza shops. Do they do anything else? I have one next week but I really want pizza. LOL ..not everyday!

Rosaestanli, perhaps the fact that you have only done two shops with them is why you do not see many shops. ACL is one of the companies that does not give access to every shop until they feel you have proven yourself. Hang in there and keep doing a good job and you will start to see the other shops.There are many different shops in the LA area.

@sandyf wrote:

There are many different shops in the LA area.

There are actually so many shops in L.A. that I had to create a separate email for ACL, because the number of offers I get was overwhelming my inbox.

I wish they would offer the option to just send out the weekly update of available shops, rather than spamming me every time a shop within range of me became available....

I've done 2 shops for them and won't be doing any more. An $80 meal is just not worth staying up until 5 am to get the report in. Only to have it returned for more narrative. If you are a fast, very descriptive writer, it might be worth your time.

I always ask for an extension and they always give it to me. They give me 24hrs to turn the report in.

As long as you communicate about timing, the scheduler or mentor will help you out most times.
Editors will see the notation.

@Rousseau wrote:

@Orrymain wrote:

ACL is one of the MSCs where you apparently build with them over time. I had the reimbursement only shops for a long time and then suddenly there were a slew of different type of shops available to me. Some are not reimbursement based at all. They will bonus, when necessary, though it's usually not that much, at least in my experience.

I haven't done any shops for ACL because of the lack of fees. They e-mailed me and asked why I was inactive. I told them the truth.

About how many no-fee shops did you have to invest in before you started to get fees?

Anyone else experience the same?

The second pizza shop I did for ACL came with a bonus. From then on I always asked for the bonus. Now I get that and the "app" bonus, too. I also have done some ACL "keep the change" shops that have simple questionnaires. That means ACL will give you a flat fee of say $16/ The required purchase costs perhaps $11.50 (a sandwich and side). You keep the change.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/28/2016 06:20AM by PuaM.

Has anyone done the medical type shop where you use a deal for a first visit at a minimum cost to the patient. The amount you paid for the first visit is reimbursed to you but with no further fee. I never accepted these as my health insurance would pay for me to go to the doctor so it would be pointless for me to write up a report so that I could get the same visit I would have gotten thru my health insurance for free. Evidently others had a similar problem with these shops and now the bonus is $20-30 for the shops that are left around here. I was wondering what this shop entails as there is generally a significant amount of narrative and it seems to me that for a medical related visit there will be a lot of conversation to report as well as timings. These shops might be limited to the LA area so if you don't know which shop I am talking about that is why. If anyone has done them is it worth the $20 bonus?. I am pretty sure as a new patient I will be pressured by the medical office to make a follow up visit.

@sandyf wrote:

Has anyone done the medical type shop where you use a deal for a first visit at a minimum cost to the patient.

I read the details and couldn't delete that email fast enough.

There's an enormous amount of work involved with the assignment. They want pictures. You have to judge the sales pitch and voice an objection, get names and report if they follow up. Report on a call to the clinic, etc.

Also, since you have to give them real contact info to gauge the follow up, I'm sure the clinic will hound you relentlessly to return.

On top of that, the fact that if you actually need medical treatment, going for a a visit to a doctor that's part of a chain trying to sell memberships may not be the best approach to getting well. If you don't need treatment, imagine how poorly that scenario could go. That's the particularly disturbing part to me. I didn't think there's a fee high enough for me to put my spinal health in jeopardy..and $30 for it is laughable.

For me, this marks a point where ACL has gone from a company that never reimbursed well and occasionally paid a sub-standard fee to one that potentially disregards the health and well being of it's shoppers. I don't care how nice they are. This is a low point for the company IMHO.

After I grew weary of the contact emails looking for shoppers to complete these shops, I actually emailed them and asked how I could stop receiving the constant offers for shops I didn't want without deactivating myself entirely. Their answer was for me to remove my email address from my profile, and then simply put it back in if I ever wanted to take a shop.

It's kind of messed up that you cannot be an active shopper without being subjected to the constant spam of undesirable shops, so for now, my contact info has been removed from my profile. For the minimal number of shops that I take from ACL, my week will be a lot smoother without having to constantly filter through their emails...

It might be easier to just keep your email address on file with them, but to create a mail rule to automatically file away emails that contain key words or domains. That way you wouldn't have to add your email back in to accept the occasional shop.

I'm in the LA area and never saw those shops. I wouldnt take them because I have health insurance(primary and secondary). I did take a bonused storage shop( tour) with no out of pocket. I also asked for an additional bonus and got it.

I had pushed the emails off to a rarely used gmail account about a month ago, but when I had to open that account up to find something else on my phone the other day and realized that there were literally hundreds of emails from them in June alone, I came to the conclusion that I simply don't want to be receiving that many emails from a company I work for 6 times a year.

Sassie has a great system where you can turn off shop notifications, but still have communication with the MSCs open. This just seems like some crazy attempt to keep me on the hook to receive all of the junk emails about shops I don't want.

BTW, you can't even remove you email address. It wouldn't allow me. I had to put a a dummy email address in...

Emails is a great topic to start a thread on. I literally get 75-100 emails a day and the majority of them are from msc. And I only shop very part time so I am not signed up with many companies. I shudder to think what the email inbox would look like if I was signed with 200! At least I feel loved when I open my account every day and see I have mail. But then I start deleting and don't feel so loved anymore. But I don't want to miss that shop that I have been waiting for...the one I did not even know existed til I got that email.
Thanks Steve to your response about the medical shop. I figured it would be bad but it sounds even worse than bad after reading your added issues. I have never taken any of the massage shops for some of the same reasons.

There's another MSC where I can't stop the emails. They will not send regular notifications but they send any shop that has an incentive and there are a ton of those. That MSC does not let you turn those off. I get a ton of those. It's very frustrating.

I just passed my two year anniversary with ACL. I have pretty much only did the reimbursement restaurant shops during that time. I don't mind the 12 hour deadline for the report because I always eat early anyway and I'd rather get the report out of the way before going to bed. It does bug me when an editor sometimes takes as long as two days to finish editing a report! Why should they get 48 hours when we only get 12? Sometimes the new schedulers are a little clueless which can be a pain. And the biggest pain--schedulers who don't check to see that I live on the west coast and call super early! But, I have never had a problem getting my check in the mail and I like the restaurant I mystery shop at so I'll continue on.