Those of us who shop really need to get a handle on what is a fair rate and then use that information to be able to value the services we provide accordingly.

Entrepreneur magazine recommends determining an hourly rate, calculating the time required for a task, then doing the math. This is contrary to the way that I (and I suspect many others) have been working. I know I am guilty of mistakenly settling for what the MSP offers, or -- at best -- what the MSP will pay, if the shop fee has been negotiated. For experienced shoppers this is almost funny! Have YOU ever gone into a store and told the store how much YOU want to pay for their products? OF COURSE NOT!!! We need to determine how much our time is worth. In order to do that, we need to know how long a shop takes or should take. Although I have compiled some information (below) based on my best guestimates, it might be helpful (for everyone) to have some general idea of what is normal. In this way, I may be able to identify, for example, if I spend too much time executing a shop -- compared to other shoppers.

I would be happy to compile this information and make it available to all shoppers who request or reply to this post, but need your input. I do not do every kind of shop and the time shown in the table below is based on my guesstimates of the time I spend on these tasks.

Some general questions to determine your level of shopping:
What certification, if any, do you have?

How long have you been mystery shopping?

How many shops do you average in a month?

What is the average fee paid for your shops?

How far will you travel (on average) to mystery shop?

How much time do you spend on Administrative work (reading emails to find desirable shops, applying for shops, scheduling your work, maintaining your shop log, banking, dealing with equipment/transportation issues, etc.)?

Please provide information (as shown below) for the amount of time you spend Mystery Shopping. This includes Preparation (reading/reviewing scenario, guidelines and survey questions); Shop Execution; and Reporting. DO NOT INCLUDE DRIVE TIME.

WRITTEN SHOPS
Kind of Shop - Approximate time in Minutes: Preparation / Execution / Reporting:

Apartment (targeted, appointment required) very detailed - Prep: 30 / Exec: 60 / Rept: 120
Apartment – medium detail - Prep: 25 / Exec: 60 / Rept: 60
Apartment – minimum detail - Prep:20 / Exec: 60 / Rept: 30
Bank (teller only) - Prep: 10 / Exec: 10 / Rept: 10
Bank (teller + platform) - Prep: 15 / Exec: 20 / Rept: 20
Bank – account opening/mortgage/loan scenario (elaborate) - Prep: 20 / Exec: 30 / Rept: 20
New Auto with test drive - Prep: 30 / Exec: 60 / Rept: 40
New Auto without test drive - Prep: 15 / Exec: 45 / Rept: 30
Retail (one item - hard goods) - Prep: 10 / Exec: 20 / Rept: 15
Retail (two items – hard goods) - Prep: 15 / Exec: 45 / Rept: 30
Automotive Service - Prep: 15 / Exec: 60 / Rept: 20
Clothing/Shoes/Accessories, other soft goods - Prep: 15 / Exec: 30 / Rept: 20
Fast Food - (I don't do, so I don't know)
Restaurant - Prep: 20 / Exec: 90 / Rept: 40
Senior Living - Prep: 20 / Exec: 90 / Rept: 45
Grocery - Prep: 10 / Exec: 60 / Rept: 15
Shop by Phone - Prep: 10 / Exec: 15 / Rept: 10
Cell Phone - Prep: 15 / Exec: 30 / Rept: 15
Purchase/Return - Prep: 15 / Exec: 45 / Rept: 30

Add other shop types as necessary in your post and please provide the time in minutes for Preparation/Execution/Reporting.

For demographics:
Your Age:
Your Gender:
Your State:

MrsFrank. Anyone with any experience Mystery Shopping already has a handle on what is fair. As Independant Contractors wer select the jobs at pay rates we can live with. Jobs that I consider low in pay are easy to manage. Request a bonus based on reasonable expectations or simply wait for the pay rate to go up.

What do certifications have to do with someone's "level" of shopping? You should talk to my scheduler friend who was desperate to fill a job and excited to find a Gold shopper. Her enthusiasm waned after finding the shopper had never completed a single shop and was totally lost when she had to completely redo the report that had already taken days to get from that shopper.

a certification is as good as a college degree in many professions these days...

It's always about who you know, not what you know.


As far as fair pay, it depends on the individual person to an extent. While there should be a baseline, there will always be the shopper that takes shops for seemingly "fun" and loses money doing them.

Time to enter reports will also vary widely by person as some of us are more intutive or have a system for getting reports entered quickly.

I can enter a basic report with some comments and with 5 or less photos in a matter of minutes while someone else I shop with will never take less then 15 minutes to enter the same report as they have a harder time with "not using 20 words when 5 will do".

Again, everyone does this for their own personal reasons.....

*second verse, same as the first.....*

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2012 02:57AM by Chix.

I agree with Lisa and Techman that certification does not affect pay levels. I also do not think age and gender affect pay levels on the shops I do. I can't speak for the ones I don't do.

That project proposal is interesting, but it sounds like a tremendous amount of work that might not pay off at all. It's pretty hard to get a business to pay more when they don't have to pay more. Flipping that around, I sure wouldn't want to shop for less unless I had to shop for less, so why should they pay more if they don't have to pay more?

@ MrsFrank ~ I understand what you are getting at but I agree with MDavisnowell who said, "That project proposal is interesting, but it sounds like a tremendous amount of work that might not pay off at all." I think you should use that extra time to work on your MS'ing goals and find out what works for you.

I honestly believe that my silver certification helped open some doors for me but it has not changed my pay per shop. My hard work, concise reports, and reliability (among other things) have led me up the ladder to the higher paying shops.

I have more to say but I don't want Techman01 to scold me for using my allotted number of words. And yes, I am kidding. But it is fun when Techman01 gives back a good zinger every once in awhile. ;-)

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/11/2013 04:12PM by CAscotch.

As always, I will say that the going rate for shops will always be set at what the market will bear. No amount of organizing or refusal to work from forum members will change that.

Second, If you are going to count the time spent at the location, you have to include the value of the reimbursement as far as I'm concerned. To do that, you need to figure out the percentage of tax you pay and also multiply that into the reimbursement, since it's not taxable.

I had a dinner shop Friday night with an over $200 reimbursement, and that looks more like $250 when I consider the taxation issue. When I add in the fee and divide by the time spent, I'm over $50 per hour, which is decent pay for me. Some would argue that the dinner value should be less, since I could obviously eat on my own for less, but they have not met my dinner guest. The value received in my life from taking her out to one of the best restaurants in the city is worth far more than the cost of the meal. To me, it was 5 hours well spent and fairly paid. Those who see it as a crappy $6 per hour job are missing out on some of the finer aspects of MSing IMHO.

Lastly, @CAscotch; You are spending too much time prepping for a dining assignment. Cut that down to 5-10 minutes once you are familiar with a MSC.

Agree with SteveSoCal. This is a supply and demand issue. What's fair is determined when a shopper says "yes" or "no." I like doing auto dealer shops because I like cars. I probably take a lower fee than some others for that reason, even though my reports may be more incisive (IMHO). I dislike retail return shops and would have to see a significant premium to bite on one. I do fast food only when it's incentivized but jump at high-end restaurant shops because I like good meals. Perhaps just as important, I use MS for additional income. That means when I'm busy I get more expensive and when I'm bored I get less expensive.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2012 08:09PM by emccded.

I don't have any old song quotes to add to this discussion, but the prep times seem a bit excessive. Granted that may be because of how long I've been at it now. Once you do the same shops over and over again it is usually a matter of a minute to find out if anything has changed. I may also be one of the only people that actually likes tests. To me they are a quicker way to discover changes than reading through pages of guidelines. If you are only doing one of a particular shop then prep time can eat up some profit. Change it to dozens and the time invested becomes nothing.

I seem to spend oodles of time on prep and report for FD (each company wants something different so I go over it all so as not to mix them up) but I do not count the eating time at all towards my personal calculation of money for time as that time is time I would want to spend in the restaurant anyway. I do count the time in a retail store as generally if I buy something it is not something I would have bought anyway but just a trinket to satisfy the receipt requirement. I have never done a p/r shop as it never sounded financially lucrative to me to have to go back and stand in a return line or find the correct person plus driving and parking etc for an extra $5 over the ones without returns.

Part of what the market will bear is based on labor costs as well as availability. If there are 10 shoppers going for the same 1 hour job at $10 ofcourse the MSC can price it low. If we were organized and refused to take shops at a bare minimum cost than the MSC's supply of shoppers would decrease and the demand for the shoppers services (fees) would increase. The same car shop I did for $25 last month was bonused up to $100 this month because they could not find another shopper to do it. That bothered me.

Ummm..... and the amount of time it takes to get the pay and the $40 reimbursement restaurant shop you did this month. And then you run into the disector who keeps finding 'this and not that' in your narratives and keeps sending it back for a revision. Then you finally get an ok after you come full circle.

I am aware that the project I propose would be enormous. I would model it after a similar study of Business Support Services' pricing.

What we do is not rocket science but it takes skill. Working alone as we do; however, we don't know if we are fast or slow, sufficiently thorough or not.

Probably one item I should add to my proposal, would be how many times, in the course of a year, has an editor contacted you for additional informatio? Someone who might take half as long, for example, in the preparation or report, might be contacted by an editor with every shop submitted. I don't know. Personally, I get contacted by an editor about once a year, if that. Does that mean that I AM spending too much time on my reports? I don't know. I cannot see how I measure up without data that could provide ranges. 1-2 shoppers willing to provide this information is not enough to make any meaningful sense out of it. I would need many shoppers to contribute their info.

I am willing to do the work to provide shoppers with some information that can help us run our businesses. But I cannot do the report without information from others. By the way, based on the survey for ABBSI, it could take months to publish results. Therefore, if I receive data from shoppers by the end of 2012, I would hope to have the 2012 report completed within the first quarter of 2013.

MrsFrank Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Have YOU ever gone into a store and told the store
> how much YOU want to pay for their products? OF
> COURSE NOT!!!

Actually, I have. And it worked. It's easier for Mom and Pop owned stores. The last time I did this was for a dog I bought at a pet store I frequent. I hadn't intended on buying her but darn it, I fell in love while I was whiling away the hour until my son was done with his guitar lesson across the street and she had too much personality not to take her home. (I now avoid the pet shop so I don't fall hard again. LOL) The previous month they had their dogs on sale so I called up, asked to speak to the owner and asked if he'd honor a sale price on the dogs since they were full price now. He didn't hesitate to say yes. And I got a nice discount. Which made me feel a little better about buying at the pet store instead of waiting for the SPCA to have a suitable dog for my needs, even though I'd already looked there first.

Here are two problems with expecting more pay from MSPs:

1) As Steve pointed out, supply and demand. There are ALWAYS new shoppers willing to work for less. Which is a big reason why fees drop. I've been around for over a decade and when I first started, many experienced shoppers were complaining about the fees that dropped back then. We've complained in the decade plus since I've been doing this but there is always someone new to take the place of people like me who refuse to work for less pay than I once did.

2) Route shopping. It might not be worth it for me to take a $15 fee shop if I'm starting at home then going to the location. However, if I have a shop that's right next door and I know it'll take me no more than 10 minutes to complete the $15 shop in-store and another 30 minutes for the report (at most), then I don't mind picking up that $15 shop since I'll be there anyway. Doing so just upped my hourly rate since I can now add that shop fee into the equation to lower my overall expenses. MSPs know shoppers do route shops to make decent money in this business. Most of the owners/schedulers/editors I know have been there and we know that a smart shopper can make a nice profit off of a $15 shop when played right. The biggest way to influence this industry for yourself is to make wise job decisions based on YOUR needs and not worry about what everyone else is doing or why they're doing it.

Now, even if it's not worth the $15 for experienced shoppers to pick up that shop, please refer to #1 as there are always newbies who are willing to give it a try because they have more time than money available and need something that works around their schedule, not vice versa. That last statement is what got me into MSing as I was a mom and full time student working as an English tutor and editor for the school paper. It didn't take long to learn that there's a better way to earn a buck in this business by doing multiple shops nearby one another on the same day. And thus, my illustrious MSing career was born.