You'll be working your fuzzy tail off for $50-100 a month. A lot of the shops pay from $7-15 each. I'm the only shopper in my region, so I tend to wait until they're a critical shop or take a long distance one to bump up the price. But the highest I've ever gotten a shop up to is $35 and I had to drive two hours each way to get there.
Most of the companies will reimburse you for your meal (meaning you have to buy it first and get the money back the following month) on a restaurant shop or will pay for a small item (like $2-3) at a grocery or gas station. The fast food shops are the ones I take most often, but they're not a piece of cake. You have to buy a meal through both the drive-up and walk-in (without being noticed as showing up twice, BTW) and at least taste the food. You have to time your visit to the second, keep track of names of servers and other details in your head (because if you write things down, you'll be spotted as a shopper.) Often the store is notified that there will be a shopper there sometime during the day, so they'll be watching for you. Get caught and they'll report to the company that you didn't do a good job.
I gave up on department store shops. You've got to memorize like a dozen product codes, with sizes and colors and search for them in the store and then remember how many of each size there were by remembering THOSE product codes---because you can't write them down for fear of being marked a shopper---all the while fending off the "courteous and helpful" staff that want to keep shoving you toward either a fitting room or the register. They warn you in the instructions that the clerks are
supposed to be aggressive, and the chain will want to know how many times you're approached while shopping, and by who.
The most frustrating one I've had lately was a gas station shop. It was actually easy up front because it's an "authorized" shop where you're going in as a company representative to do an audit. But there were like a dozen required photographs to take of various items, a fifteen page checklist of things to watch for, but mostly it was the time it took to enter the data on the shop company's website and format the photographs with the required title, size and resolution. It took me close to FOUR HOURS to do the shop, and I made a whopping $20.
Lesson learned on doing one of those again.
But I do like the restaurant shops, when I have time. I'm one of those "white glove" inspectors that are looking for things wrong. Not terribly nice, I know--but wonderfully useful to the management.
