What to Do When A Mystery Shopping Provider Won’t Pay You

There are a handful of mystery shoppers who are working in this field to help create a better consumer experience for others, but for the most part, mystery shoppers are working in this job to enjoy the convenience of a flexible work schedule and extra money in our pockets, too. But what happens when you have done the work on an assignment and your provider won’t pay you? Here are a few steps you can take to get that paycheck in your pocket where it belongs:

Are You the Early Bird? Before you contact your mystery shopping provider demanding immediate payment, you should double check the date the assignment was approved as well as the payment time frame that the provider promises. Keep in mind that the approval date is not necessarily the date you submitted the report, and sometimes this date may be several days or even a week after you submitted the report. If you check the fine print on the provider’s payment guidelines, you may find that the payment is promised with so many weeks of that approval date. Usually you can check the approval date online through a provider’s account portal.

Did Your Report Get Approved? Everyone misses an email from time to time, and most providers will notify you of changes or revisions that need to be made on a report via email. If you missed that important email, there may be a chance that your report has been sitting in limbo for all of these days or weeks while you thought it was approved and pending payment. Such an event does not happen often, but it can happen. You can prevent this from happening by ensuring that each of your reports gets approved with a quick follow-up check on each report after submission.

A Simple Follow-Up. In most cases, a simple follow up email to your provider will resolve the payment situation  you now find yourself in. After you have double-checked to ensure that payment is in fact overdue on a report that was approved, your next step is to send a  brief, professional, and tactful follow-up email to the provider. You will want to state the date the assignment was completed, the date it was showing as approved, and the date when payment should have been sent to you based on their payment time frame. Chances are, this was a simple oversight, and a quick email to the provider will often provide you with the remedy that you are looking for.

There are times, however, when that simple follow-up email is not enough. In such cases, you may want to send a follow-up email after a few days have passed to another person in the provider’s office, and to leave a few tactful phone calls. If you are working with legitimate providers, you will find that most providers will indeed pay you within the time frame they state, but that a follow up for payment may be required from time to time to ensure your payment didn’t fall through the cracks along the way.