Generally, when you are doing a meal shop for one person, you just need to order one entree. You might be asked to also order drinks, appetizers, desserts, etc. However, I've never heard of a single person being told they must order more than one entree items. Of course, if you have guest, you typically need to order two entrees. That said, your guidelines are the rule. What you've said about them above is not clear, so I can't answer definitively. You can also email your scheduler s/he should be able to clarify it for you.
How familiar are you with casinos?
If you are not that familiar, you'll want to start with a smaller one so that you can acclimate yourself with the atmosphere. Or, you can simply visit one on your own time and learn the lay of the land....
If you know casinos reasonably well (including how to play a couple of the table games), it's not a big deal. You'll have lots to remember if you have multiple areas to visit, but you can always "go to the bathroom" between areas and take some notes on your phone.
I only take casinos if I can keep the winnings. Otherwise, the work/pay ratio is typically pretty unexciting.
The way to improve your "points" is to successfully complete assignments. Every time you do, your points go up. Every time you fail to complete a shop or reschedule, you lose points. If you have "negative" points, it will be more difficult to get assigned shops in the first place. (Basically, every time you are unable to complete a shop, for whatever reason, the scheduler has to find somebody else to do it - which often means missing their deadlines and/or having to offer another shoppers a sizable bonus to get it done last-minute. Your reliability is everything in this industry.
Correct.
When you cancel shops, you make the MSC try to find a different shopper - which can lead to them either missing a deadline with their client or having to pay a premium to get the other shopper to take care of it last-minute. Canceling shops really burns the MSC. So, every time a shopper does so, it makes the MSC less likely to want to try to work with that shopper again. Moreover, the shopper who has a history of canceling shops will not be called (and offered fantastic bonuses) when a scheduler is desperate to get a shop done last-minute.
On the iSS platform, "points" are used to rank a shopper's reliability, so each time a shopper cancels or reschedules, s/he loses points. When shops are completed successfully, the shopper gains points.
Shops are done at night for all sorts of businesses so that the evening staff is assessed as well as the daytime staff... A mystery shopper who does his/her job well, will not be suspected at any time of day.
Submit the report through this site.
You have been gone for a while! Virtually all mystery shopping reports are submitted online through MSC websites or hosting platforms (such as iSS).
You can sign up with as many companies as you want. I am with well over 100. The only way to know if a company will have work in any particular area is to simply sign up. Yes, U.S. companies frequently have work in Canada - and vice versa.
Every MSC is different in this way. Sometimes it can take better than two weeks for shops to be approved - especially at the end of the month, when more shops (by far) tend to be completed. Though we have contractual agreements for completing shops, the MSC does not generally have that same agreement in our ICA. If they were to have such agreements, they would have to hire a lot more editors at the end of each month, which would decrease the quality of the work they turn into their clients and increase their bottom-line costs, both of which would make them less financially healthy and, therefore, able to pay us less than what they do currently.
Yes, it can feel frustrating. It might be worth checking each MSC's ICA with which you work to see if they pay a certain amount of time after shop completion or after shop approval. If they pay X days after "completion," the shopper is not affected by lags in time to approve the shop on the MSC's end.
You should get a 1099 in either U.S. mail or email (for online access) for every MSC from which you have earned $600 or more. However, some MSC's, especially some of the smaller ones, sometimes struggle with this. I have received most of mine already. Note that iSS (i Secret Shop) is NOT such an MSC - it is a platform that allows MSC's and shoppers to hook up. If you do not receive all your 1099's, you'll still be fine to do your taxes without them - so long as you have good enough records that you report at least as much income as was reported by MSC's to the IRS.