Author: Mr Hustle

Last Updated: 25 October 2024

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Our Experience

This Shepper review is based on using the Shepper app for a period of over 6 months, completing over 25 jobs, and earning £250+. We've completed over 150 mystery shops for other companies, which we use as a comparison to Shepper.

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How It Works

With Shepper, you use the Shepper app to accept jobs in your area. These range from going undercover to assess the customer service at a shop, to auditing and stock-checking tasks within stores. The pay rates and expected times are clearly provided before you accept a job, and jobs usually need to be completed the same day.

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Pay

At first glance, the pay looks good with most jobs in the region of £20 per hour. However, in reality we have found the pay rates to be considerably lower in person due to the following challenges:

• High numbers of tasks: While a typical mystery shop from another company would require approximately three photos and a handful of requirements, we have commonly accepted Shepper jobs requiring 25+ photos and a large number of different tasks.
• Scheduling difficulties: Jobs must be completed on the same day or within a set number of hours. This makes it much harder to group shops together on the same day to make travelling to the store worthwhile.
• Challenging requirements: Shepper jobs have often requested compulsory photos in awkward situations, such as photos at tills or in very small stores like corner shops. Considering the pay rates, we personally did not find the pay rates worth having to attempt these photos.

As a result, the pay per hour (inclusive of travel time) we achieved from Shepper was often in the region of half what we would achieve from other mystery shopping websites.

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There are notable exceptions where the pay rates are competitive and worthwhile (£20 an hour including local travel time). For this reason, I still keep an eye on Shepper jobs to pick-up the highest quality ones.

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Job Availability

Job availability is mixed. The Shepper app suggestions there are thousands of jobs UK wide, but a majority of jobs in my local area are unpaid "training" jobs with 15+ duplicate jobs that can be accepted in order to qualify for future jobs.

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These "training" jobs can be filtered out but make job discovery painful. Jobs are often taken very quickly by other users. At the time of writing, there were no jobs available in central London (Zones 1-3).

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Personally, I find approximately one job a week that is worthwhile.

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Requirements

Shepper has no specific requirements to join other than being 18+ and creating and verifying your account.

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Reliability and Experience

The Shepper app is generally modern and well-designed, but has a number of significant issues that have resulted in much more frustration than other mystery shopping websites:

1. The app includes huge numbers of duplicate "training" jobs. These can be filtered, but it is painful having to filter them out every time in order to see paid jobs.
2. We had issues with jobs not submitting correctly and being cancelled, requiring us to contact support regularly.
3. The app requires the job be completed on the app while in store. This includes taking photos, which is more difficult on their app than with a phone's built in camera.

We have often found that jobs take longer than advertised, and pay is not adjusted if this happens. However, job approvals and payments have been very reliable.

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Overall, Shepper's high-tech approach to mystery shopping is currently a poorer experience than dated mystery shopping websites. However, the app has huge potential and we hope it will become the leading platform for mystery shopping in the future.