I used to work for them. They send me "reliable shop offers" all the time now. I stopped working for them originally because my car broke down and I couldn't afford to get it fixed and had no way to get to the shops. That being said, when I started working for them, the shops paid a little better than they do now. Now I look at the shops and I'm like.... $7 and you want me to fix price tags, which requires messing with a busy manager, and waiting around for them to print tags.... they want to pay you for an "estimated 20 minutes" which almost always means an hour, if you have to mess with a manager.
When I first started with them, I had a project manager for my area. He was great. He'd call me, and say, "Hey, can you pick up these five locations that are an hour to two hours from your house... I'll give you some extra.." and then later he'd call and say, "Hey, I have these shops and they haven't been posted yet, do you want any of them.." And then he got promoted and I got someone else who really wouldn't reach out and speak to me.
I'd plan routes (short ones, located around my area, but an "all day" time frame), based on giving myself more time than what they allotted for their turn around, and the shops would take sometimes four times as long. So, I'd run out of available time because their time frames are unrealistic, and I'd have to reschedule. The original scheduler I worked with would go in and fix my "unreliability scores" when that happened. And I'd go back out the next day and finish up what I was unable to do the first day.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're unable to do a shop in the time that they estimate, their prices are off, and your reliability score shouldn't be affected. Now they've started sending out "this is your drive time, and this is your shop time" estimates, but their drive time is based on how the bird flies and doesn't take into consideration how the roads actually go and that your car doesn't have wings.
In any case, I departed from my original thought, which was, when you were able to work with a scheduler/project area manager, it was great. When you can't. ... nope. Not worth it.
That being said, regarding pay, I recommended a friend to them. She put in my referral code. It didn't work. I contacted them. I did what they said and contacted the people I was supposed to contact to get it fixed, She emailed them, messaged them, etc. and they never fixed the referral code. She did over $6,000 in work for them, so I would have easily made my $100 for referring her.
Then their software got glitchy when she tried to accept individual things on a route offer, and it kept accepting the entire route, and then she would have to cancel the shops that she didn't want, so it affected her reliability rating. Their app has always been glitchy. They'd cancel her demos all the time, like they'd schedule her for 8 in a month or something (2 each weekend) and then go in and cancel 6 of them without even telling her sometimes. But she was the unreliable one.
So, she did hundreds of shops with them. She did frequent demos, like every weekend for them, and they paid her late several times, by like, several days. She kept telling them, hey, I haven't gotten this. She was depending on the money. So, finally, she got mad and said you sent a message saying you'd be paying within these times and dates. They sent back a message basically saying "you're unreliable, so we'll just pay you whenever we feel like it. Only our favorite people get paid on time." They admitted to paying depending on reliability ratings and basically said you'll get your money when we decide to give it to you. That's not an exact quote, but the absolutely did say that they paid according to favoritism and their "unreliable" shoppers got paid whenever they felt like paying them.
I totally get that shoppers need to be reliable. But when you can't control what their app does, or what they estimate, pardon, lie about to get people to take a job for less than what they should be paying for it.. that's on them, not the shopper. It's a totally different thing than scheduling something and then blatantly canceling because you don't want to get out of bed and go do it.
So, overall:
If you're a golden child in their eyes, then you get preferential treatment. In fact, you only get fair treatment if you're a golden child. If you make plans based on their estimated times and then *their* times are wrong and you can't complete something because, oh, geez, well, the shop says it should take 20 minutes but I've now been on site for two hours, each site, and I've got eight of these scheduled, based on 20 minutes (and then the drive time in between), then *you're* unreliable. Not them.
Their app doesn't work correctly about 1/3 of the time. And when it fails and some crap happens, it's the shopper's fault, not the app's fault.
They do NOT answer messages reliably, so if you're on the site, and you need help.. don't expect a timely message. It's sometimes taken them over an hour to respond to a job that's supposed to take 15 minutes. (Note how this plays into the doing a route thing and it taking longer than expected...).
Shops they cancel, I'm pretty sure, still count against you, even if the client pulls it. My scores dropped twice - each time after they canceled a bunch of return visits.
They flat out admitted that they don't give a crap about paying you within the three day window - breaking their own policies - if you don't have perfect scores with them. I mean, that's just outright illegal, I believe. But.. I have always gotten paid, eventually.
My friend *also* got paid eventually.
They used to be a much better company. I really liked them when I first started doing some work for them. Then they got cheap, and their jobs are far too involved for what they're paying. Try Field Agent and Observa is usually pretty good. Their jobs pay less, but you get approved and get the money far faster, and the jobs are fairly easy.
Good luck getting your money. I'm sure you'll get it eventually, but while I used to recommend Survey to everyone... not so much any more. They used to be really good. Now, not so much.
Disclaimer: To be fair, I have not done any work for them for years. I just got my car back on the road several months ago, after a hiatus of over a year, and their people have a high turn over, so I do not have any idea how many of them actually are decent now. But this pay thing with my friend happened.. this past summer. That's definitely recent.