I have requested shops and they never get approved. What is going on? Thanks.

Most often, other shoppers who have more points and badges have opportunity to grab them. If a shopper with a higher self-assign limit is looking around for something, they can self-assign it to themselves and all requests are cancelled and out the door. Also, schedulers at MSPs have the ability to see your track record and can either assign it to you or decline it, based upon what they see in your shopper profile (your shopper history).

Hope that helps.

I stand corrected on the shopper side. I spoke with some schedulers at different MSPs and they told me that even if a shop is requested, other shoppers who have more points cannot self-assign. My apology for the misinformation. It is up to the schedulers, and even editors, to make request decisions based upon both shopper reputation and client preferences. Thanks for reading.

I agree with Norm, and I'd like to add to what Norm said:

When posting shops, the MSPs can set them in one of 3 different ways in regards to scheduling:

1. They can set them to allow self-assigning - meaning that shoppers can self-assign those shops on their own, if they haven't reached their self-assign limit. They they have, then they have to request the shops. Here we can have the situation which Norm originally mentioned - if you have reached your self-assign limit, and you request a shop which is setup to allow self-assigning, some other shopper who has not reached their self-assign limit yet can just self-assign that shop.
2. They can set them to only allow requests - meaning that no shoppers can ever self-assign them, so they all have to request the shop first. This is usually the case with Web & Telephone shops, or other shops in high demand. It gives the schedulers greater control over who the shops go to - they wait for a bunch of requests to come in, and then approve those requests submitted by the most reliable/experienced shoppers, and those requests for the earliest dates - this gives schedulers the highest probability of getting their shops done as soon as possible, as reliably as possible.
3. They can set them to "assignment by scheduler only" - this is very rare, and when it happens, the shops are not even visible to any shoppers on the Available Shops page, and therefore those shops can't even be requested. Instead, the schedulers contact shoppers they want to offer the shops to, and once they agree upon a date, they assign the shops manually.

I hope this helps!

Thanks for the additional info Ivan.

You're welcome!

This was enlightening. Thanks!

Thanks for the additional information Ivan! It's greatly appreciated.

B I U S