While finishing up my spreadsheet for taxes, I realized that I'm somewhere in my 10th year of mystery shopping. A few observations on the past decade...

What I wish I'd know in my first few months:
* It's ok to take shops that don't pay that well to get your foot in the door with a new company, but choose carefully (a 54 mile round trip for a $7.50 shop was not the smartest decision)
* Treat this as a business. Keep records from day 1. Makes taxes much easier.

And in the first two years...
* If you accept the shop, do the shop.
* 10 ft pole shops are 10 ft pole shops for a reason.
* Get an EIN. My SSN is probably on more than 100 MSC systems than it should be. Caveat: Make sure an EIN does not trigger the need for a city business licence
* Check out every company here before you accept your first shop.


Schedulers
* When you find a good one, become their "dandruff shampoo" (if someone flakes, you are their first call to fix it
* Build a relationship with a few key schedulers.
* It's ok to do them a favor, but they should grant you favors in return. (a $1 bonus is not a favor)


Most interesting battle stories:
* My wife was along on a teller shop (allowed by guidelines). As I am conducting the transaction, she saw the bank manager is holding a sign in her office window that read "SHOPPER" and frantically trying to get the attention of a teller (or get a reaction from me or another customer). Neither of us saw the sign.

* Doing a highly bonused "dandruff shop" (replacing a flaked shopper), I ran into the flaker taking the exact same photos I was taking. He explained that he had shopped the wrong location, and the scheduler told him that if he got the reshop done before the replacement, he would get paid. Needless to say, he raced through the shop and when I left, was uploading photos in the parking lot.

* Receiving a voicemail at work from the local police department after a financial shop when the required question raised suspicions of the employees (and they gave my license number to law enforcement)


What I'll never do again:
* Accept a shop fee by phone without checking the job board to see what it's listed for (today, for example, a scheduler on the phone was offering $8 less than what it was listed for on their job board).

* Take photos ONLY in the MSC's app. I always take extras on my phone, in case there is an issue


Things I'll continue do in the future
* Calculate expenses (mileage) per shop. Makes it obvious that adding a second or third shop on the same trip increases profitability (or adding another shop is just not worth it)
* Set a monthly and yearly "profit goal" (and do a better job of tracking it than just at tax time)

Final observation: I've probably done >2,500 shops in 10+ years. There is ONE company that comes to mind that has increased fees on a shop (without adding significantly to the shop requirements): Service with Style. Everyone else I work with has kept base fees close to where they were or they have reduced how much we can earn. That's the nature of business: Both the MSCs and shoppers have the same goal of maximizing profit. Being selective (and negotiating fees when possible) is the key to success in this business.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2020 01:06PM by KevinE.

Thanks for sharing, both the advice and the war stories. I second your tip on loading photos on your own device rather than relying solely on the MSC app. When I did the Maritz gas site inspection earlier tonight, I frequently saved as usual. Thank heaven I double checked the saved content, because photos vanished with nearly every save and I had to redo them.

I saved the survey twice right before I left...and when I got home and reloaded, a pic had STILL disappeared. Fortunately, a photograph that was a response to another question could serve double duty. I left Maritz an internal comment about the bug, but I don’t know them well enough yet to know whether they’ll pay attention and try to fix it.

Do you think payments for shops have gone down or are the same more or less?

This should be a sticky in the new shopper section.

@sheikh wrote:

Do you think payments for shops have gone down or are the same more or less?

Good question, yet hard to answer. Earliest spreadsheet I could grab quick (2014) combined the regular fee and bonus into one number (and by then, I'd learned to wait until the fee rose to where I wanted it to be or asked for a bonus -- the only ones I am certain are at the "original fee" are ones I picked up on my way to another shop). The vast majority are exactly the same. A few that have gone down, I can see the reimbursement has gone up by a similar amount or more.

That said, the use of apps to report in the field (and not having to pull a memory card out of a camera and upload photos to a computer before reporting a shop) mean that my time to report has gone down.

▪︎Get an EIN. My SSN is probably on more than 100 MSC systems than it should be. Caveat: Make sure an EIN does not trigger the need for a city business licence

I have an EIN. I had a get a business license from my city. It costs under $60 a year and is so worth it.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2020 01:00PM by pegleg2000.

Why is it valuable to have a business license, peg?

I've only done a couple of shops for Service with Style because they don't have much in my area, but the few times I have interacted with them, I have found them to be real nice people.

I would put a great deal more emphasis on record keeping, yes, from day 1.

I have an EIN, but I think only two companies have asked me for it.

My rural location requires no business license as long as I don't have "retail" customers coming to my house. I did check! I don't hold inventory, so there's no reporting or paying of use tax.

I would also place more emphasis on developing relationships with schedulers.

And I enjoyed the war story!

Blue, I recommend calling them.

Truly.

@BlueDev93 wrote:

Thanks for sharing, both the advice and the war stories. I second your tip on loading photos on your own device rather than relying solely on the MSC app. When I did the Maritz gas site inspection earlier tonight, I frequently saved as usual. Thank heaven I double checked the saved content, because photos vanished with nearly every save and I had to redo them.

I saved the survey twice right before I left...and when I got home and reloaded, a pic had STILL disappeared. Fortunately, a photograph that was a response to another question could serve double duty. I left Maritz an internal comment about the bug, but I don’t know them well enough yet to know whether they’ll pay attention and try to fix it.

A fee remaining the same 10 years later, is literally correct but financially a misnomer, as inflation has reduced said fee's buying power. A classic example is the Trendsource grocery shops that were paying $5 + a $9 reimbursement in 2006 and the same money this year. Today, the $5, according to the CPI inflation calculator, only has the purchasing ability of $3.52. In addition, the $9 reimbursement, due to price increases, will only buy one $6.34.

Will do, thanks!

What in the world question did you have to ask? Lol

I

@Mrcleandpsyahoo.com wrote:

What in the world question did you have to ask? Lol

The usual “I want to wire this money, but I don’t want to have to show my identification”

Oh got it. Never wanted to do those because of the fishiness lol

@sheikh wrote:

Do you think payments for shops have gone down or are the same more or less?

Very few companies have increased the fee or reimbursement for their long held accounts. Service Sense is one of the few that have done so. Trendsource and Intellishop of course are the exact opposite, race tot he ground.
While usually when a client account is acquired by a different MS the fee goes down, there have been some glaring, or better shocking, shops that the fee doubled or went higher than when the first MS offered them with bonus! That's when you realize how much they make.