Hello.  I am sort of new to this Secret Shopping world and I have a question I was hoping a more experienced shopper can answer.  Are available shops posted by the Ranking you hold?  I see badges for Travel, Restaurants, etc. but I haven't seen any of those type of shops become available.  Do the available shops get fancier (for a lack of a better word) as your rank increases?

Hi Sabrina,

That's not one of the functionalities that were implemented in the Badge system - the basic idea was to make as many shops as possible available to all shoppers, regardless of their Reputation badge rank, or any other badge rank. That way, every shopper in the system that meets the basic requirements of the shop can see it, request it, and get a chance to do it. The schedulers should then be the ones leaning on the badge system to estimate how suitable a shopper is, and to decide whose requests to accept.

That said, there are a few tangible benefits to having higher levels of some specialty badges:

• MSPs can set up their shops in such a way that they allow shoppers with a specific badge level to bypass their self-assign limit when it comes to those shops. So, for example, on some Price Audit shops, shoppers with the Price Audit badge at level 2 or higher, can self-assign an unlimited number of those shops. Some shoppers take great advantage of this, self-assigning dozens of shops at a time.
• When it comes to deciding whose requests to accept, schedulers look at the badges of all shoppers that requested the shop, and the shoppers with a higher level specialty badge for that shop category are usually the ones given advantage over others.
• Before making the shops public to all shoppers, schedulers sometimes reach out to shoppers who are experienced in that area (which they can determine from their badge level for that category), and offer the shops to them proactively.

I hope this helps!

I think they often ask if there are not a lot of people at a certain store.