Why are there shops posted for online purchases yet they’re not really available when you attempt to self-adding? You try every date and every time you get the message “another shopper has scheduled a shop, please schedule more than 2 days apart”. Why can’t these just be removed by the moderators since they aren’t really available to anyone?

I had a regular mystery shop pop up with that message. I emailed the scheduler who told me it was mistake in scheduling and manually assigned it to me.

Hi Bryan,

Having these shops removed would be counter-productive, for a few reasons:

1. As there are tens of thousands of active shops in the system at any moment, and over a million registered shoppers on iSecretShop, having the system calculate which shops are unavailable to which shopper at which exact moment due to which different scheduling rules and limitations (and recalculate that every time any shop gets scheduled), taking into account over two dozen different rotation and separation rules that MSPs build into their shops when posting them - would require unrealistic amounts of processing power, making the system incredibly slow even on a supercomputer.
2. Since, as Martin said, there can be scheduling mistakes when the MSPs are setting up their shops and those rotation/separation rules, shoppers wouldn't see those shops at all - this way, if you see a shop and can't request or self-assign it, you can always reach out to the schedulers and let them know. They can then resolve the scheduling mistakes, making the shops accessible again.
3. Similarly, schedulers have the possibility to manually override any scheduling limitations in the system - so even if you are not able to request/self-assign, you cna reach out to them and they can assign the shop to you manually, if they feel that's appropriate. This is actually quite commonly done, especially near the end of the month (or any given shop period) where they have to get the shops assigned, so they tend to be more loose with the scheduling rules.

The system already has a few built in tools to help reduce the effects of this - for example, shops which you can't do due to demographic requirements are already automatically hidden for you from the Available Shops page entirely (i.e. if the shop requires you to be 21-27 to complete it, and you're older than 27, or if a shop requires a female shopper and you're a male, etc).

Also, the calendar widget should be graying out the unavailable dates, or otherwise indicating visually which dates are available and which are not - this was added this year due to shopper feedback. If it's not working, let me know and I'll look into it :)

Cheers!

I see some where it has to be 6 days apart or 14 days apart.What a pain!