Shop2drop2, you were asking if Customer Perspectives was reputable. Yes they are. They pay by paypal around the 15th of the month following the shop. They have a variety of shops (In January I did a restaurant, a credit union and a retail shop for them). They use the Prophet system for job scheduling and report submission.

Mary, Yes I am in Texas. I live in the Houston area. I'm assuming there should be a booming mystery shopping business in Houston!! Mary, are you by any chance anywhere near Abilene?

Shop2drop2, I live in one of the western counties in the DFW metroplex. I have worked north to Nocona, south to Clifton and Whitney, west to Abilene, and east to Arlington and Grand Prairie. I do most of my work within 65 miles of home.

Shop2drop2, looks as though you have already gotten lots of good advice. I will add to make sure you stick with companies on this or another reputable site as there are many look alike scams out there and even shoppers who have been forewarned have gotten caught up in these. The other piece of advice, along the lines of don't bite off....some of the shops (and not all shops for the same company have the same rules) require you to shop in a very small window of time, others give you a couple of days to complete the shop you have accepted. If you have some days or even hours when you feel you just cannot get out the door due to your breathing problems I would avoid those which have a very small window to get the shop done in. One thing these companies will strike you down for is not completing the shop at the appropriate time which can be as little as an hour time frame.

RE: Beisen

Shopping can be an isolating endeavor. Perhaps he just needed some rousing debating...anyway, this has drifted into a personality discussion, and heretofore focused on shop issues, which is what this forum is supposed to be about, yes?

On that note, FYI, for about the third time,same situation, I accepted a shop 2 days ago with Certified for an ad check in a theatre near me. Easy shop, not crazy reporting. This AM I get a general email that this exact shop is bonused almost double. I called. The spin I got was that this applied to only shops left unaccounted for. I had searched. No other shops were unnaccounted for. I said that I would then expect the bonus should apply to my shop. I expected wrong. My beef was that since I had scheduled the shop early, when it became available, that it seemed a last minute shopper would reap the benefit of jumping in at the last second. This was about principle for me. I have done many shops for this company, always on time and well -reported. I was annoyed, and I'm sure you all know the type whose attitude is, "Well I'm sorry that you feel that way...", not that their principle was less than savory....

Anyway, had to vent.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/22/2013 11:09PM by triciabb.

The bonus for last-minute shoppers is standard operating procedure for many companies. The closer it gets to the deadline more than bonus increases. Their business model l is if I can get somebody to do it for six dollars all is well, if they can't they will continue increasing prices until they find somebody willing to do it. You can always wait to see if there are bonuses, then you run the risk of somebody taking and receiving no fee, because you have no shop to do.

Tricia,

Read Shelly's reply; I couldn't have stated the matter more factually, succinctly and/or logically.

A quick review of the principles of supply and demand in this business...

-Fees and subsequent bonuses are set by MSCs/clients at levels that are most advantageous to them and yet still supposedly equitable enough for a shopper to accept.

-Shoppers make decisions on a case by case basis as to whether an assignment opportunity is financially worthwhile or has some other intrinsic value to them.

-If shoppers take an assignment at a lower rate early in the job posting cycle, they are indicating to the MSC/client that the renumeration is acceptable and they are agreeing to complete the work at that pay rate.

-If no shoppers consider an assignment opportunity to be worth their time and effort, the MSC/client then has to sweeten the pot to make it more worthwhile by offering bonuses as an inducement.

-Bonuses are not retroactive.

Yes, Tricia, Shelly and bob have it right. It would be nice if every shop we got was bonused, or if there was a bonus for being the first shopper to take the shop. The benefits (to the shopper) of scheduling a shop early are that you will know early what your schedule is and be able to plan AND you book the shop and make sure no one else gets it. The benefit to waiting to book a shop is that it may be bonused toward the end of the month - OR another shopper may take it and you won't get it at all. But unfortunately, you can't reasonably expect to schedule a shop early at a certain pay, keeping other shoppers from taking it, and then go back and renegotiate a higher price than the price you accepted.

Hubby chimed into say it's like filling your tank on Tuesday at $3.50 a gallon. The price drops on Thursday to $3.45. Doesn't matter how shiny your awesome rig is or how much the gas station attendants have admired it on previous visits - you're not gonna get a refunded discount.

Thank you all for your responses. I know about the end of the month bonuses, and am usually able to take advantage of it. If I had booked this on the 1st and the bonus came on the 28th, I would agree -I do understand the system. With this one, it just came across as 'bait and switch'- applied on the 18th, it's now bonused on the 19th?? There are still 9 more days in the month! Plus there were no "unaccounted for" shops at the bonused rate! I have gotten other supes at this company to tag on the bonus when it's this close between offers,so they are in the habit of doing this, which just seems like the right thing to do, depending on the whim of the one you speak with.

Ask a substitute teacher, or a car wash attendant, a hostess at a restaurant, or a clerk at the local grocery store what they make per hour and what their expenses are. And, then compare.

I DON'T KNOW. NO ASSIGNMENT YET. ALL I DO IS ANSWER MY EMAIL. WILL SOMEONE EMAIL ME A ASSIGNMENT TO START. I NEED SOME M O N E Y. I'M READY TO WORK. WILL SOMEBODY OUT THRER DO FAVOR FOR OLD A24?

Anthony, a bit of forum protocol. Please don't type in all caps. It's difficult to read and in the internet world it usually means shouting. If you use caps because you yourself have trouble reading the screen, you can make the text bigger by holding the CTRL key and rolling your scroll wheel, or hitting the plus sign if you don't have a scroll wheel. Thank you.

You need to understand that nobody here is going to email you an assignment. You sign up with the shopping companies, go to their job board and apply for the job you want. Most of them will email you if they assign you the job.

So that's your assignment -- go sign up with some companies and look for jobs. I'd suggest starting with the MSPA job board or jobslinger. If you find a job there, you will then have to sign up with the company that is offering the job -- MSPA and jobslinger are consolidated job boards that many mystery shopping companies list with.

He posted something similar back in May as his only other post.

Reminds me of limmie who also shows up to just ask the same inane questions over and over again. Sounds like kids who had their video games taken away and are looking for some entertainment. I would suggest paying more attention to their homework since neither can read or write worth a damn.

I liken the bonus question to the reverse experience of shopping garage sales. You can either go early in the morning and get what you want when you want it for the full asked price, or you can show up at 2 PM and take your chances that there will be something you want and it is marked down in price. If you come back at 2 PM and ask for a discount on the item you got at 8 AM that will not work. There is always someone who is the last to purchase right before the price goes down (or up in the cases of bonuses). And who knows, perhaps the price went down because your purchase has just meant the seller has met their goal of money made for the day and now wants to just clean up and go inside.
I have noticed bonuses on shops in my city have started much earlier in the month than ever before. I saw them starting even before the 20th and generally I see nothing at all bonused even on the 29th.

Since I do several gas stations on a monthly basis, I made a "cheat sheet". This was a way of compromising between what the companies require to be printed up and my short cuts. In the end, everything gets covered, the jobs are completed correctly and, most of the time the cheat sheet requires less than 1/4 sheet of paper. I also, have a copy machine and those are pre-printed and set into folders. I don't have to run and print up the criteria or LOA's before going to a job. They are already in a physical folder.

I've been doing that for years. The time it takes to create is more than made up by the time saved as I do more and more of them. Some MSCs also screw around with the reports and their printable materials that the information is totally out of order and would require flipping back and forth between pages. Mine are always on one page and set up in the order I find easiest to complete the steps.

Now if we could only get them to put the reports in that logical order, too.

No kidding! That is why having my cheat sheet be one page is crucial.

Speaking of strange printable forms, there are two in particular that just bug the living crap out of me. Sassie and maybe Prophet are identical to the report, right down to big boxes for uploading photos.

Market Force loves to include say 30 questions and you look down and see things like, Q17 No Question 17, Q23 No Question 23. Is it that flipping difficult to delete and renumber?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/25/2013 03:06AM by LisaSTL.

I work in statistics outside of mystery shopping. If you delete and renumber the statistics get all screwed up. It is very possible, although I have never thought of this before reading your suggestion Lisa, that they are doing trend analysis (which is what I do all the time in my line of work) on those questionnaires. It is so much easier to track back in time over the months or years to see whether or not the chain or individual store is trending better or worse or jumping all over the place on compliance on an individual data point (question). When the numbering gets changed, I have to keep going into the data and updating the changes by hand on that particular variable. But what they can do if they are sophisticated enough is renumber for the purposes of the report but have the new numbers default to the old numbering system once it gets recorded. Of course this would take a programmer who knows how to do that. Thanks for mentioning that. For some reason even though I do that all the time at work, I always just assumed they read each mystery shop report and then that was it. It was good or bad. Period.

The one that gets me is the blue bank "combo" shop.

You make the call. Request the materials. Have to wait for them to arrive. While waiting, you do the bank shop. Materials arrive from the phone call. NOW you can enter the report.

The report is laid out like this:

Date/time of call. Did you talk to someone? Did you have to ask for materials? What did you get? Did you get this? Did you get that? ANYTHING ELSE WE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THIS CALL? (required comments) Next section: Date time of visit to bank, did you talk to a banker.... etc.....

So I make the calls. I fill out the date and time fields on the printout. I answer the questions up to "What did you get?" Set the report aside. Go do the bank shop. Flip to the part about the bank shop. Fill in the answers. Wait for the mailed stuff to arrive. Yay. I can enter my report.

So I go through the report starting with the phone call, enter the time/date. Answer questions. Tell them what I got. And there's that "anything else we should know about the PHONE CALL?" question.

Who the heck even remembers the phone call by that point? It could be 8 to 10 days afterward by the time you do the report online. Would it kill them to print that question right after the questions about the phone call itself, instead of after the questions about the materials you got in response to the phone call?

Secret,

As I've completed hundreds of combo shops, I have ten for next week, I suggest you type what I have always used in that box: Nothing. There has never been an occasion when I've had anything to report, but, I have used that area to explain unusual situations involving the entire assignment, which would include the branch visit.

It seems to me they could do that on the back end with the actual report, can't they? What I'm talking about is just the printable version to be used on-site for an audit or notes following a MS.

sandyf Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I work in statistics outside of mystery shopping.
> If you delete and renumber the statistics get all
> screwed up. It is very possible, although I have
> never thought of this before reading your
> suggestion Lisa, that they are doing trend
> analysis (which is what I do all the time in my
> line of work) on those questionnaires. It is so
> much easier to track back in time over the months
> or years to see whether or not the chain or
> individual store is trending better or worse or
> jumping all over the place on compliance on an
> individual data point (question). When the
> numbering gets changed, I have to keep going into
> the data and updating the changes by hand on that
> particular variable. But what they can do if they
> are sophisticated enough is renumber for the
> purposes of the report but have the new numbers
> default to the old numbering system once it gets
> recorded. Of course this would take a programmer
> who knows how to do that. Thanks for mentioning
> that. For some reason even though I do that all
> the time at work, I always just assumed they read
> each mystery shop report and then that was it. It
> was good or bad. Period.

Lisa,
Actually, from a prgramming standpoint, deleting a question and renumbering would required reprogramming a ton of "conditions," like, "if Q 14 is yes, Q 16 must be n/a." This does get expensive and is a very error prone process. So, it is really better to "eave Q15 "intentionally blank." I used to design questionaires for huge, national longitudinal surveys and keeping the "conditions" straight was always a thumping great PITA.

If the programming is done correctly in the first place, the change should only have to be done in one place. But this requires a lot of forethought by the software designer and the questionnaire designer. The numbers show to the end user (us) should not have to be the same as those used internally. [/programmer rant]

It's interesting, but I'm putting this numbering issue on my long list of stuff I can't fix and I won't be worrying about.

And here I thought you could fix anything. Especially with all that stuff in your car..

Oh, dear, it's back.....