Body Shopping

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What Does Body Shopping Mean?

The practice of body shopping in IT involves consulting firms or other businesses recruiting workers in order to use them to fulfill contracts on a short-term or mid-term timeline. It is similar to the process of outsourcing in the IT world, and has been used in various cases where companies want to benefit from the services of an individual without hiring that person on full time.

Techopedia Explains Body Shopping

The idea of body shopping gets into the very intricate economic realities of units of labor in information technology. Some body shopping setups lead to people asking whether the company is simply putting its brand on an individual's services without adding value. However, it can streamline things for clients – one way to think about beneficial body shopping behaviors is with the individual as a producer, and the body shopping company as that person's agent in the marketplace. However, if the body shopping company is taking too much of the profits, that can be an issue.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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