Frequently asked questions

A person on the panel team reads it. There is no automated score that accepts or rejects an application on its own.

The review compares the household profile in your five screening answers against the sampling plans of studies that are currently open and those that are about to open. It also checks the record against existing memberships, because the panel is limited to one membership per person and duplicates distort every study they touch.

What the review is not doing is judging whether you would be a good panelist in the abstract. It is answering a much narrower question: does this profile fill a cell that current research needs.

Applications are reviewed on a weekly cycle, so an application submitted on a Tuesday is looked at in that week's review rather than immediately.

Being reviewed is not the same as hearing from us. We contact applicants when their profile matches an open study, and that may be in the week after applying or several months later. There is no separate acknowledgment email confirming that an application was reviewed and shelved, because a message that says nothing has changed is not worth sending.

Your application stays on file and is matched against studies as they open, for a limited retention period set out in the Privacy Policy. Not qualifying now is not a permanent state.

It is also the common outcome rather than the exception, and it is not a judgment about you. Whether a profile is needed depends entirely on which studies are open at the time. A profile no study calls for in March may be the exact profile a study is short of in September.

If you would rather not stay on file, write to us and we will delete the application.

One membership per person. Submitting several applications does not improve the chance of an invitation; duplicates are identified and removed, and a pattern of duplicate applications is grounds for exclusion.

Two adults in the same household may each hold their own membership, using their own name and their own email address. They are separate people with separate answers, and studies that need one respondent per household handle that at the sampling stage.

Not at the application stage, beyond internal consistency. We take screening answers in good faith.

They are checked indirectly later. Screening answers are compared against answers given inside a study, and a contradiction between the two is one of the signals that removes a response from an analysis set. The practical advice is simply to answer accurately: an inaccurate profile leads to invitations to studies that do not fit, which wastes your time before it wastes ours.

Adults aged 18 or older who live in the United States and can enter into the Terms of Service. The panel is operated for the United States market only.

Irregularly, and less often than most people expect. Contact is driven entirely by whether an open study needs your profile, not by a schedule, so members go through quiet periods with nothing at all and occasional periods with two invitations close together.

We do not send newsletters, promotional email, or reminders that a member is still on the panel. If an email arrives from us, it is about a specific study, about your own record, or a reply to something you wrote to us.

No. Participation is voluntary for every study, each time. Consent on this panel is given per study, not once at the point of joining.

Declining an invitation, or simply ignoring it, has no effect on your membership and no effect on future invitations. Silence is treated as a decline. There is no minimum participation rate and no status that is lost by not answering.

Stop. An abandoned response is removed from the analysis set and nothing follows from it.

For a diary study that runs over weeks, tell us if you need to drop out partway through, so that the quota cell can be refilled while the study is still in the field rather than reported short at the end.

Yes, and you should when they change. Write to the panel team from the address currently on the record and tell us what to update.

Screening answers matter here more than contact details. Household size and shopping patterns change, and a stale profile means invitations to studies that no longer fit your household.

Every legitimate message from us comes from an address at shopperpanelusa.com and concerns a specific study or your own record.

The reliable test is what is being asked for. We never ask members for payment card or bank details, Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, passwords, or account credentials, for any reason, in any study. A message asking for any of those is not from us, whatever it looks like. Forward it to the panel team and do not reply to it.

In most cases, answering questions online in one sitting: multiple choice, rating scales, and a few open boxes where you write in your own words.

Other study types ask for something different. A purchase diary asks for short entries several times a week across a field period. A packaging review shows designs on screen and asks what you understand from them. A follow-up interview is a scheduled conversation with a researcher. The invitation always names the type and describes the task before you decide.

Typical single-session studies run between 10 and 30 minutes depending on type. Follow-up interviews are scheduled for 30 to 45 minutes at a time you choose.

Diary studies are different in shape: individual entries are short, usually under two minutes, but they run across a field period of two to six weeks. Every invitation states the expected time before you accept, and if a study overruns what was stated, that is a fault in our design and worth telling us about.

Online, on a computer or phone, at whatever time suits you within the field window. Some studies are delivered through a third-party survey platform, in which case the invitation names it and that platform's own notice applies to what it collects.

The panel does not run in-person sessions, and nobody from the panel visits a member's home.

No. No study requires a purchase, and no study requires software to be installed on your device in order to take part.

Because a quota cell filled while you were answering, or because an early question in the study established that the design needs a different profile than your record suggested.

It is not a rejection and it does not affect your membership. Quotas are fixed before a study goes into the field precisely so they are not stretched afterwards to accommodate whoever arrived, which means some invited members reach a full cell.

From the application: your first name, last name, email address, and five screening answers covering age range, household size, online shopping frequency, product categories bought most often, and whether you write product reviews.

If you take part in studies, the responses you gave in them. If you write to us, your message and the address it came from. That is the whole record. We do not ask for a street address, a date of birth, an income figure, an employer, or a phone number, because none of those are needed to match a household to a study.

In access-controlled systems, encrypted in transit, with internal access limited to the people who run the panel. Data is stored and processed in the United States.

Retention is bounded rather than indefinite: applications that are not accepted, active member records, study responses and correspondence each have a defined retention period, set out in section 7 of the Privacy Policy. You can ask us to delete your record sooner than any of those periods.

The panel team, and the client that commissioned the study, ordinarily in aggregated or de-identified form. Reporting is at the level of a group, and open-text answers quoted in a report are attributed to a profile rather than to a person.

Where a study design genuinely requires identified responses, the invitation says so before you decide whether to take part. Service providers who host our systems, deliver our email, or run a survey platform can technically access data in order to provide that service, act on our written instructions, and may not use it for their own purposes.

No to both. We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we do not supply member details to advertisers or list brokers.

This site runs no advertising trackers, no analytics pixels, and no third-party marketing scripts. The application form runs entirely in your browser.

Email the panel team from the address on your record and say which right you are exercising. Access, correction, deletion, and removal from the panel are all handled through the same address.

We acknowledge privacy requests within 10 business days and complete them within 45 days, and we do not treat a member differently for having made one. Full detail, including how to appeal a denial, is in sections 10 and 11 of the Privacy Policy.

Write to support@shopperpanelusa.com from the address on your record and ask to be removed. One line is enough and no reason is needed.

We close the membership and confirm in writing. You will not receive a retention offer, a survey about why you left, or a follow-up asking you to reconsider.

The membership record is closed and then deleted or de-identified. If you want it deleted immediately rather than at the end of the ordinary retention period, say so in the same message and we will treat it as a deletion request.

Responses already delivered to a client as part of a completed study cannot be pulled back out of that research record, because they are already de-identified and aggregated into findings. Everything that still identifies you is removed.

Yes. Ignoring invitations is itself sufficient, since silence is treated as a decline and no status is lost. If you would rather be paused explicitly for a period, tell us the period and we will exclude your record from sampling until it ends.