Is it all worth the effort? Mystery Shopping, Survey Filling, etc.?

Not_Another_Username · 23 January 2015 at 2:37PM

A quick intro:

My wife and I have a small amount of debt but we are generally managing things well enough. A little extra money is always a good thing, so we decided to give the Paid Survey thing a go and have also put in for a spot of Mystery Shopping. We don't expect to make a lot of money but we wondered if these things were really worth the effort.

Personally, I have registered with Ipsos i-Say, Swagbucks, Crowdology and Panel Opinion. I haven't been successful with pinecone so far, as expected. I don't expect these companies to throw money at us and I am sure I will need to fill in a lot of surveys before payents start to appear. As a target figure I wondered if the form fillng might bring in a few £100 in a year. I expect that will take a fair few 100s of surveys but I expect there will be a fair amount of repetition of survey topics if so. I expect we will need to throw in a few other money-making/point-scoring tasks to make it pay.

What we don't want to be doing is living on our computers and finding out we've earned only a few £s.

If it's fun and worth doing then we'll probably stick at it. Hopefully we'll find some good tips and tricks here and will happily return the same should we discover any ourselves which are worth sharing.

Thanks and best wishes!

John

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pickle_me · 23 January 2015 at 3:01PM

When I first started using MSE and reading about surveys, I signed up for three: Pinecone, YouGov and Swagbucks.

Swagbucks I only signed up for because they were doing a special MSE offer - I think it was something like 'earn enough points for a £5 gift voucher and we'll give you a £15 voucher'. I didn't like Swagbucks - too time-consuming, too much rubbish to wade through, and I never seemed to be the right demographic for the surveys. I stuck with it until I got my £15 Amazon voucher, and never went back.

I'm still slogging away with YouGov but I find it pretty slow and dull. I'm halfway to £50 now, will keep at it until I get the payout, then I'll quit.

I love Pinecone

I get a survey every 1-2 weeks and they pay out very promptly. I find the surveys less tedious than the YouGov ones too. I'll stick with Pinecone for as long as they'll have me!

Edited to add: I get £3 per Pinecone survey and it feels like very little effort. It probably does bring in around £100 per year - not much help to you, sorry, but if you get signed up to Pinecone it's definitely worth doing.

MrCrimeFiction · 23 January 2015 at 3:03PM

I signed up to Swagbucks a few weeks ago, but found out it took nearly a 1000 points to earn £5. After a week I was only on 54 points so I gave up. Its maybe a good idea for DESPERATE times, but I've not reached that level yet. I am happy to invest my time into reading or other family things rather than survey filling.

They all get a thumbs down from me im afraid.

MrCF

lovinituk · 23 January 2015 at 3:06PM

Surely if you take the amount of time spent on these things and extrapolate it out to an hourly wage, it would be less than minimum wage?! Even if you're desperate, I would imagine you could earn more money (and spend less time) getting a small cleaning job or the like in the evenings?

~Beanie~ · 23 January 2015 at 3:25PM

Mystery shopping doesn't really pay that well either, you may have to buy something and then you will get the cost refunded but they don't pay much in the way of actual fees.

Not_Another_Username · 23 January 2015 at 3:25PM

Thank you all for your quick replies. Appreciated.

The overall picture I am seeing is one of little return for a lot of effort, which I half expected. So far I have been able to amass a reasonable amount of "Swagbucks" for the effort involved. i-Say seems reasonable too, but time will tell and I don't plan on giving up just yet - I have never been a shirker and there's little point in giving up after only a few days.

I must admit I was quite sceptical about Swagbucks when I saw all the little annoyances on the site. It looks like a money-making racket to me. If anything, this is the one I will ditch first.

I had a nice reply from Pinecone, explaining the situation with new registrants, probably a standardised reply, but it was good of them to respond.

I am a full time Carer for my disabled wife, so the work situation is not straight-forward. We have been looking for something we can both do from home and thought this whole area would be worth a look. It all started after we watched that famous Watchdog programme on the TV last week promoting Online Survey Filling, Mystery Shopping, Extreme Couponing, etc. The presentation made it all look quite glamourous and easily within our grasp. I am not a stranger to extreme couponing myself and so I know some of the ins and outs of that. After reading related information on MSE it seemed like it might all be worth a try, but I expected this would all work out less than the minimum wage but was prepared to accept that, providing it wasn't completely OTT exploitation.

Looking forward to reading more accounts of this and thanks again for the responses so far.

(Excuse the silly username btw - I am not that new to MSE. I have had numerous problems logging in and had to create a new account.)

Not_Another_Username · 23 January 2015 at 3:26PM

Thank you Beanie. Our replies crossed. Mystery Shopping is something we have yet to experience and have already completed one registration.

bambos · 23 January 2015 at 3:57PM

I've been doing valued opinions which I found good at first and even got my £10 voucher quite quickly but now it seems I fill in the survey and get half way through with it chucking me out saying I haven't qualified which is odd considering I have completed half of the survey.

I joined Quidco last week and have so far got two quotes, ordered my vitamins from boots & switched my current account earning £42 in total. You can link it so that whenever you spend online or instore you earn cash back. It can take a little while to pay out (boots are going to take 8 weeks) but others pay more promptly.

Just a thought.

Silian · 23 January 2015 at 4:27PM

lovinituk wrote: »

Surely if you take the amount of time spent on these things and extrapolate it out to an hourly wage, it would be less than minimum wage?! Even if you're desperate, I would imagine you could earn more money (and spend less time) getting a small cleaning job or the like in the evenings?

I agree with this. I filled a few surveys in online and found it extremely soul destroying. After a while I realised that I was paying my cleaning lady a LOT more than I was getting in surveys.

So I started doing the cleaning myself. While I absolutely hate cleaning (so much that I sell some of my leave each year to pay for it), I hate it less than surveys. And it "pays" a lot more.

Finding a second job (if you can) will be a much better way to earn extra.

greensalad · 23 January 2015 at 5:09PM

I'm on One Poll. I do it during downtime at work, so I'm already getting paid so it's just a bonus I guess!

Quidco is my best friend though. I do most shopping online and I have the Chrome extension which alerts me when I can shop through Quidco on a site. I book hotels through it and have got about £100 in the last two years. I used the £100 in December to purchase loads of Christmas presents. It was great.

lovinituk · 23 January 2015 at 5:11PM

greensalad wrote: »

I'm on One Poll. I do it during downtime at work, so I'm already getting paid so it's just a bonus I guess!

That's got to be the best way of doing it :T

Just be careful it doesn't get you in to trouble with your employer though for misuse of their system.

Is it all worth the effort? Mystery Shopping, Survey Filling, etc.?

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