I am just a few months into Mystery Shopping and I think I am finding my footing. I finished August with 61 shops completed and a good amount now waiting on in fees and reimbursements. I'd like to keep that momentum at least through the December holidays. However, I am finding that now I have to wait to do shops because I've already shopped or audited these same locations. I'd like to sign up with some new MSC's but Im wondering if I under or over for what most of you seasoned vets work with. In July and August, I worked regularly with 11 MSCs?? I am thinking maybe signing up with 10-20 more?? What say you?

I've heard many say they are signed up with 50 companies. I am still at about 20 or so but only check about 10 consistently.

whoa.... 50? My email is always on fire now, I can't image what it would be like with 50 or more MSCs all emailing... wow! I wouldn't even know where to begin lol

Overall I am signed up with more than 200. Of those, some have disappeared over the years, changed their names, been bought out by someone else etc. etc. Any time I see a new-to-me company I register to try at least one shop if possible. Then we play 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly'. [queue sound track of 'di-le-di-le-di dum dum dum'] IF a company has work in my area (and less than a quarter do), put my best shopper observation skills to work on them. What is the job, what are the requirements, are the guidelines ridiculous or just absurd (or sometimes even reasonable), is the pay appropriate for the expectations? What do peers I respect think about the company/job in question? Perform the job and note when, according to them, I should be paid. What kind of feedback do I get? Was the job worth the pay? How much would fair pay be for this job in the future? Was I paid on time (not necessarily to the minute, but within a reasonable range of when I expected to be paid)?

Note, I will not bother to do a job that wants me to be paid by some method other than direct deposit, check or Paypal. Life is too short to deal with payment by bit coins, bill.com, Pay-quicker, Pay-slower, Come-and-Get-it, gift cards or other nonsense and I want to be working with companies that handle their business in a business-like fashion.

One or two shops is generally enough to decide whether a company is one with whom I wish to work further. Within that company there will be some jobs I will be willing to perform and some that just are not interesting.

Each year, around the end of the year, a certain number of clients will change companies with whom they are contracting for shops. I want those companies to step up and send me an email that they finally have shops in my area, and usually they do. Meanwhile, it really doesn't matter if I get 40-50 emails a day that go directly to the trash without opening because I know who the 20-30 companies I am working with this year are.

Great info, Flash!! Thanks so much.

@Flash wrote:

Overall I am signed up with more than 200. Of those, some have disappeared over the years, changed their names, been bought out by someone else etc. etc. Any time I see a new-to-me company I register to try at least one shop if possible. Then we play 'The Good, The Bad and The Ugly'. [queue sound track of 'di-le-di-le-di dum dum dum'] IF a company has work in my area (and less than a quarter do), put my best shopper observation skills to work on them. What is the job, what are the requirements, are the guidelines ridiculous or just absurd (or sometimes even reasonable), is the pay appropriate for the expectations? What do peers I respect think about the company/job in question? Perform the job and note when, according to them, I should be paid. What kind of feedback do I get? Was the job worth the pay? How much would fair pay be for this job in the future? Was I paid on time (not necessarily to the minute, but within a reasonable range of when I expected to be paid)?

Note, I will not bother to do a job that wants me to be paid by some method other than direct deposit, check or Paypal. Life is too short to deal with payment by bit coins, bill.com, Pay-quicker, Pay-slower, Come-and-Get-it, gift cards or other nonsense and I want to be working with companies that handle their business in a business-like fashion.

One or two shops is generally enough to decide whether a company is one with whom I wish to work further. Within that company there will be some jobs I will be willing to perform and some that just are not interesting.

Each year, around the end of the year, a certain number of clients will change companies with whom they are contracting for shops. I want those companies to step up and send me an email that they finally have shops in my area, and usually they do. Meanwhile, it really doesn't matter if I get 40-50 emails a day that go directly to the trash without opening because I know who the 20-30 companies I am working with this year are.

Right now I'm active with 20. I'm signed up with over 100. I'm a part time shopper with 949 shops total in 2014. I've cranked it up considerably this year and am at 959 through the end of August so I'm already well ahead of last year's total shops. Am I making any money? A little. Do I know what I'm doing? Sometimes I doubt it.

I'm signed up with around 135 active companies and have another 30 or so that are either defunct, got bought out, or I moved to the junk pile for some other reason. I only regularly work with 25 or so.

I will say that I would not base who I work for simply on payment method. DD, check, and PayPal are all great but they're not the end all be all. The end of the month I have a $2700 payment coming through one of those "undesirable" ways and quite frankly I'm pretty happy about it.

I'll take it any way it comes and be glad to get it. B, congratulations on the $2700. That's cracking. (We say that down here, it means that's good, that's an attaboy for you.)

I am signed up with about 200 companies and, like, Flash, have seen some of those get merged or die off. Though I regularly shop for about 20 MSCs in a year, I find that 10 of those pretty much remain the same from year-to-year and of the other ten, there is a lot of fluctuation because I am always (even after 10 years) discovering that a company that I may never, or rarely, have worked with now has something that really pays well and interests me. For instance, before 2015, I had last done a shop for MSC A in 2006. In 2015 I had a chance to start doing a very well paid monthly shop for them that also produces a ton of rewards points. That project will run for 18 to 24 months and then, unless MSC A has something new that appeals to me I will look elsewhere to replace the $200 per month that they currently provide. I took a 5 year hiatus from MSC B, but 2 years ago they got a client that pays well and provides shops that I love, with reports that are easy for the fees and perks involved. I now do 6 to 15 of their shops a year at an average of $100 per shop, plus perks. Another reason not to cancel the emails from a company when their current offerings do not appeal to you.

I get more than 200 MSC emails per day. I can safely delete 95% of those without opening them because they are clearly offering "same old, same old." So I don't see why some people seem to have a hard time coping with a lot of MSC emails. The 5%, or less, are pure gold!

When I was a newbie, I had a business plan that included the following goal: on any weekday that I do not have at least one assigned shop, I will sign up with no fewer than 5 new MSCs. I just started though the MSPA list (This was before Jacob's Forum was around to provide a more comprehensive list!) and ran through the alphabet. By the time I reached "M" I had more offers of work that I could perform. (I kept going until I made it through the list, though!) It took me a while to decide which of the MSCs to move to the top of my "Contacts" list, and I still rearrange the top of that list about every 6 months. (Takes about 5 minutes, lol.)

I would sign up with as many as you possibly can. You never know when a new shop will come up with a company you have never worked with, and you will be thankful to get that e-mail notifying you of the new shop. I work regularly with under 10 companies at any given time, but those companies change. I was doing steady work for a few that I have not shopped in years and I have done a few shops here and there for others, based on projects that come up for a short time. I would rather have too many e-mail notifications, then not enough.

I have ten? Nine? Eight? Companies.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2015 04:06PM by Shop-et-al.

What are some good lesser known companies? I will use that strategy to work through the list from A-Z and sign up for them all.

@cnortorious wrote:

What are some good lesser known companies? I will use that strategy to work through the list from A-Z and sign up for them all.

That is one of those questions that is truly location dependent. For me for a few years Restaurant Cops was the perfect company because they had a client with 7 locations in my area and one was more wonderful than the next. They client stopped having shops and they have had nothing in my area for several years. As a general rule of thumb, I find the good lesser known companies tend not to be on the SASSIE reporting platform.

I'm registered with about 12 companies or so. I regularly do shops for half of them. I don't like doing restaurant shops and I don't do any shops which involve purchase & return, so that narrows down the # a good bit.

Retrodaddy, that is what makes mystery shopping so unique to each of us and why it is virtually impossible to tell someone specifically what companies they need to register with. It is possible to name a few companies that have shops everywhere that are fairly basic and would work for new mystery shoppers. Beyond that, I like doing restaurant shops and you don't; neither of us is interested in P&R; I like banks, you like ____; I won't do _____, which you think are great.

The more companies a shopper registers with, the more possibilities they have not only to find work but to find work that really floats their boat. What other business offers opportunities from dumpster diving for bags of confidential records to evaluating a wind tunnel? From mailing a package to your kid to evaluating closing procedures at a retail store? From getting your morning coffee at a truck stop to evaluating room service in a posh hotel?

Concur with Flash. Each of us has his or her own unique criteria for determining which shops are a good fit and/or are worth one's effort and time. You gotta do the research and see what possibilities are out there. I can share with someone which shops (mainly banks) I like to do and think are worth my time and effort, but that's such a small sample and I have no clue if that's a good fit for someone else.

Also, please tell us more about dumpster diving for bags of confidential records...

I never did the dumpster diving but a lot of us had a good laugh when it came up. Evidently some businesses had been found out of compliance with the laws in disposing of customer/client records and court settlements called for them being spot checked that they were in compliance going forward. I'm sure they had some more attractive name when the shops were put out there, but basically they were dumpster diving.

I like shops where I actually make money. I do a few reimbursement type shops and only one dining shop per month. I was gaining so much weight by having to order drinks before dinner, apps, dinner, dessert ... And then I had to pay Weight Watchers to lose the extra weight for that "FREE" meal. Why bother? <I know, I know ... I didn't have to finish that meal ... but oh, it was so good!>

So glad I asked. You guys are the bomb.com with a friendly, courteous, corporate compliant cherry on top.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/11/2015 07:55PM by MysVal.

I am currently signed up with 72 MSCs and regularly work for about 30 of them. When I hear about good MSCs on this board I check them out and sign up if it seems like a good fit. Sometimes on jobslinger I come across assignments for companies I'm not signed up with; I check them out and sign up if it seems promising.

The way I avoid email overload is that I adjust my email preferences in my accounts with them -- for the ones I work with most often I opt in to receiving emails. For the rest, I opt out and just check their job boards from time to time. And a few of them don't have job boards to check - they just email you if they have something in your area.

There's nothing wrong with bill.com - with it you get direct deposit. It's a service that an MSC or other company pays for, and my understanding is that they do that because it's a more efficient way for them to process payments. It works just fine - the payments show up in my bank account like any other direct deposit.

Good luck MysVal!

Good grief, Charlie Brown!!!! Where do you find all those shops? I can barely keep up with 15 companies per month. I signed up with more, but they do not always have shops in my area and i don't drive.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/12/2015 12:56AM by Taradawner.

Registered with 9 or 10, active with 5.

I am signed up with approximately 100 companies but I am not currently active with all of them. I am very busy with 25 companies right now. As other shoppers have mentioned, sign up for as many as you can and check them all out. Some of the companies I used to get a lot of work with do not have the same shops anymore so I have had to move on to other companies. It seems that about every few years I notice that I haven't been shopping for some of my regulars and have been doing shops for new MSC's. Mystery shopping is an ever changing business and we have to go with the flow, as they say!

Signed up with over 200, work with about 10. Had to sign up for 200 to find those 10.

I worked for 21 different companies last month. This month I added a few different ones. So, I suppose I work for about 30 regularly and a few more less frequently.

I'm registered with a ton, but I've never counted. In reality, I've done shops for about 35% of those I'm registered with. There are another 20% that have shops in my state, but so far there has been nothing I could do for them. The other 45% have yet to show a shop in my state. I check the MSCs I've shopped for regularly for shops; I check the ones that have shops in my state semi-regularly, and I take a look at the others once every week or two just to log in and see if anything has changed. Things do change. A couple of my current fave MSCs were in one of those secondary categories until last spring when they suddenly appeared with shops I could do. My advice: sign up for a bunch and monitor. Oh -- and I do now have just a couple in a new category of MSCs I choose to avoid for one reason or the other.

@Roxie wrote:

Signed up with over 200, work with about 10. Had to sign up for 200 to find those 10.

ditto for me

I'd say about 10. Maybe signed up with 15 or so.

Signed up with over 250 and probably at least 95% on the official list at the bottom of the forum. I regularly work with 25-50 a year and besides maybe 5-10 the rest change. I too can run through email quick and no need to open most.
Flash bill.com is direct deposit just how they process it by direct deposit. But i hear ya. Pay quicker or gift cards no. I just wish everyone would go to direct deposit as paypal takes me extra time to transfer to bank account.

@BuffaloNY101 wrote:

I just wish everyone would go to direct deposit as paypal takes me extra time to transfer to bank account.

Or you could just get a PayPal debit card and use the money immediately PLUS the get 1% cashback on your purchases (so really it's probably better than your actual debit card).