Mystery Shopping Jobs for Beginners, Getting Started with Legitimate Mystery Shopping Jobs

People might wonder as to whether the mystery shopping jobs opportunity and benefits are for real. The fact is that mystery shopping job offers are hundred percent genuine and can help any individual earn big money. However, one needs to be cautious of the scams that are present in large numbers in the mystery shopping industry.

An individual need not possess special educational qualification or technical knowledge to start a part-time or full-time career as a mystery shopper. Mystery shopping job can be an excellent career option for supplementary income-seekers. All one needs is to explore the mystery shopping job field before entering it and then locate a legitimate company that has some genuine mystery shopping offers in store. Legitimate companies do not charge a single penny. Therefore one can get started after signing up with a legitimate mystery shopping company for free.

It must be noted that legitimate mystery shopping companies have their job announcements in many portals. To be sure of the legitimacy of a mystery shopping company, one can look for contact information details, address, and phone number in the company’s site. The same information can be verified with reputed consumer forums.

To register with a legitimate mystery shopping company, an individual needs to fill an application that comprises a simple quiz. Based on the quiz answers, companies decide whether an individual qualifies for their pre-designed mystery shopping assignments.

Once an individual successfully signs up with a mystery shopping company, an assignment invitation (matching the individual’s profile) is either sent to his mail id or is communicated over the phone. One can accept the assignment invitation or reject it is required. Mystery shopping companies do not penalize individuals for rejecting mystery shopping assignment invitations. However, it is advisable to respond to every invitation as it would not only help build reputation with the companies but also get more high paid mystery shopping job assignments.

One can earn a decent income doing mystery shopping jobs. The payment terms and policies vary for company to company. Some companies pay on a monthly basis while others pay on a bi-weekly basis. Again, some companies pay in hard cash, some others offer gift coupons or vouchers, merchandise, free product samples, sweepstake entries, etc., whereas some companies offer both cash and exciting rewards. With mystery shopping jobs, one can earn high as a hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars per day. But this significantly depends on one’s ability to carry out as many assignments as possible in a day and also on his performance standards.

Mystery Shopping Job Requirements, Skills required to become a Successful Mystery Shopper

Mystery shopping is no longer alien to people, especially to those who seek for additional income sources. The mystery shopping concept was introduced in the mid 1940s. Since then, it has come along way. The definition of mystery shopping has undergone drastic changes. Today, many individuals work as mystery shoppers and get paid in decent cash or other exciting rewards. People believe that mystery shopping is a great way to earn supplementary income and turn rich overnight. It is true that mystery shopping can help one earn a steady and decent income on a biweekly or monthly basis, but that it would turn a person rich, isn’t true. Besides, it takes a lot of hard work and patience to turn into a successful mystery shopper. The following factors need to be considered to achieve success in the mystery shopping field.
Every mystery shopper is required to have sharp observational skills. A mystery shopper is sent on a secret shopping assignment where he or she is required keep a watch on various factors, like, product and store conditions, behavior of the employees, their standards of customer service, whether or not the business ethics are strictly followed, etc. After verifying these factors, the mystery shopper is required to report it to the concerned mystery shopping company who is hired by a client company. The mystery shopping companies are responsible for designing and conducting effective mystery shopping assignments. An accurate report can be created only when the details or happenings in the store are minutely observed. After all, the details are used for improving a business.
Mystery shoppers should be professionally responsible such that companies can rely on them for proper evaluation of their brands. Individuals who can take up and complete mystery shopping assignments on short notice can easily gain reputation in this field. One can also boost his potential earnings by taking up multiple assignments in a day and completing them properly. This would not only help the mystery shopper win the confidence of his boss but would also help him get good assignments. Companies expect secret shoppers to be punctual in completing their target assignments.
It is important to perform the tasks seriously. Rescheduling the assignments for no valid reason or any kind of goof-ups while creating the reports can mar one’s profession.
Prior to every mystery shopping assignment, an individual is provided with strict guidelines, which he needs to follow throughout the assignments.
Though not mandatory, good writing skills can help a mystery shopper create an accurate report that communicate the right details to the clients. There are many online resources available nowadays that can help one polish his writing skills.
This can help a mystery shopper to recall all the factors observed during the assignments.
The shopping assignments are required to be carried out secretly. As such, a mystery shopper cannot reveal his or her identity to anybody. He is required to pose as a regular customer and keep an eye over the various factors.
In brief, it requires a lot of hard work, patience and certain skills to become a successful mystery shopper.

Job Market for Mystery Shoppers

There are various organisations that are interested in hiring Mystery shoppers. All most all kind of organisations that we could think of from fast food retails shops to high-end designer jewellery stores hire secret shoppers. There are numerous organisations looking for Mystery shoppers in the market. Thus the prospects to earn more money as a Mystery shopper is always there for the taking if are ready to take advantage of it. The job market for Mystery Shoppers would never go away because organisations are always in search for methods to improve so that they could earn more money. And they have plenty of individuals inside of their organisations those who would evaluate their products or services. But what they don't have are employees who can act as Mystery shoppers and appraise their stores from a customer standpoint. Even initially high profile ranking managers and CEOs have tried to do it themselves but stores always seem to be "mysteriously" notified of the CEO's or managers coming and everything is always perfect when they get there.

This became the motivation for the organisation to start hiring Mystery shoppers. Regular people can go into stores and pose as a regular shoppers while they secretly evaluate and analysis the store. The most benefited part of the whole act is that employees inside of the store don't even know that Mystery Shoppers are there. So they prolong to act normally. Thus Mystery shoppers can see how employees really act and how well they maintain their respective assignments when nobody is around to fire them.

So if we want to earn some extra bucks of money and not have the constraints that we have working a regular 9 to 5. Then Mystery shopping jobs is the exact job for such individuals. Because as a Mystery shopper populaces can operate as a independent contractor and make their own schedule.

What it Takes to Carry out Mystery Shopping or Secret Shopping Assignments Flawlessly

The term ‘mystery shopping’ appears to be mysterious to many who are still aren’t much aware of this unique part-time job. They are rather ignorant of the profession of a mystery shopper and assume that the latter is some kind of a secret agent or a spy. The truth, however, is far from different. Mystery shoppers or secret shoppers are the ‘detective eyes’ of major companies who need to judge or evaluate their business performance as well as their prevailing market standards. Mystery or secret shopping jobs are legitimate and are, in fact, those tools that help secretly assess product conditions and customer service rendered by the employees in a particular outlet or store. This ultimately leads to better business decisions and helps a company attain a bigger and better brand name.

For secret shopping assignments, the shoppers get the chance to travel and explore various outlets or stores in their respective areas, use a wide variety or products or services for free, dine out with family and friends in expensive restaurants, and so on. One might easily get a mystery shopping job but achieving success in this field requires a lot of effort, hard work and diligence – just like any other regular office job.

Those who have a fair idea on what mystery shopping actually is might also have this perception that it is easy to become a mystery shopper and get some very good shopping assignments and earn big time. However, there are some other crucial factors that determine the success of an individual as a secret shopper. Secret shopping involves the methodical scrutiny of the ambience of the assigned store, customer service offerings and promptness of the frontline staff and shopping assistants, employee conduct and finally giving an unbiased and honest verdict of everything observed in the form of written or recorded reports. Hence a secret shopper should have good surveillance skills and a rational outlook.

To become a reputed mystery shopper, it is essential to provide the client companies with honest and appropriate information on each shopping assignment. For this, one should be able to write a report logically with error-free grammar, must ensure that whatever he writes is to-the-point and easily understandable. There is no need to use high quality literature style as that would make the report all the more complicated.

Since millions of people across the world have access to the Internet, many mystery shopping companies have switched to online recruitment of mystery shoppers and also have provisions where the shoppers can submit their reports online. This endeavour has helped save considerable costs and time. For applying online, one needs to fill an online form with honest details. Once registered with a mystery shopping company, a shopper can carry out his assignments and submit the reports online while keeping a hard copy of each report.

It is not necessary that beginners hired for secret shopping assignments would have the required skill sets instilled in them. Mystery shopping companies offer basic and advanced training to all the hired individuals so that they can carry out their secret shopping tasks easily and do not encounter serious problems while on the job.

Mystery shopping a business management structure

In most of the business management structures there are some list of rules or protocol. Such protocol list might be kept in written or are stored in the head of the individuals at the top of the organisations. In business management, the bottom line goal is always to make a profit from our organisation or business. One is also in charge of the overall maintenance and the look and feel of the business outlet. So in business management, what an individual would when someone on their team is not fulfilling the rules or responsibilities that is clearly laid out by the organisational management.

For instance, most business management structures do some form of performance management. What is meant by that is that most managers lay out a clear expectation and they follow up to ensure that employees are following those expectations. If an individual do not have some form of performance management structure within one business, then one are throwing away their money. Some people within their business property management structure are not abiding by the rules and are continuing to work for by taking away organisations profits. For such instances, organisations are using performance management through monthly mystery shopping. A mystery shopper came into their business and pretended they were actually looking for something. But in fact they were testing the ability to take care of the customer. The goal for this business management structure was to score a 95 percent or higher after they were evaluated by a secret shopper. The top quality associate received a 70 percent.

Keep in mind, such associate who are on top of line, would soon be promoted, and generally gets the customer taken care of. When tackled with this score, all employees’ response would be simply and assist them to improve their performance and help them for their professional growth.

Mystery shoppers are the individual who are responsible to assist the organisation to improvise their products and especially their employee’s performance. The play the major part of employees performance management, employee appraisal and salary hike and promotions.

Apart, for betterment of employees mystery shoppers also play vital role in product development, they even try to identify from the customers how they react about the organisation products. Mystery shopper take the feedback from the consumers and identify their needs and recommend the corporate if they are required to change or alter something in their products in order to increase the sales.

Mystery Shopper in return are paid by the corporate in form of cash, vouchers, tickets, free gifts, free shopping etc. They are paid as per project based and only after they submit their complete report with full analysis, graphs etc.

Mystery Shoppers – an individual with lavish schedule and handsome payout

Mystery shoppers are being utilized everyday by big and large corporate to offer them with precious imminent into their business outlet locations from the observance and feedback as of a consumer. And these big organizations compensate these mystery shoppers to do their jobs as per the pre decided instructions and they would always continue to do so as long as they use brick and walled business location stores to market and sell their products. That's the reason we can identity limitless jobs and assignment of mystery shopping that would be available. This signifies that we ourselves can make a decision of how much money we want to make as a mystery shopper. Actually Mystery Shopper job is doing a detective work about the employees behavior, responses and as well as the attitude of other consumers about the product or services. Most individuals opt for mystery shopping job for a part time income but some individuals also do it full time and earn a very decent living. Because we can schedule multiple jobs in the same area which means that one can kill two birds with one stone at the same time have a benefit of double or triple the amount of income that one could earn.

Mystery shoppers also have the lavishness of having their own schedule. Thus one never need to worry about missing anything or not having enough time to do a particular personal work because we are our own boss and can schedule our own jobs and have the rights to decide when we need to complete the assignment. The only thing that one has to be particular about after we accept an assignment is to make sure that we complete it on time and submit our mystery shopping report back into the company before deadline. If we follow these small tips then one would never have problems while being a mystery shopper professional and expert.

We soon can be one of the reliable and known Mystery Shopper as soon as we complete the given assignment with all the required and accurate inputs and reports, which can be numerical data, or some analysis, or graph/chart, or any specific customized report. And after one complete some couple of assignments and organizations began to identify that one is very reliable professional and finish the assignment on time they would start to give the individual the more highly paid assignments. The highly experienced and expert professional mystery shoppers’ in this field earn as much as 50 to 75$ per assignment, along with other benefits like some gift vouchers, a dinner or some trip etc…

Part time Market Research Jobs, Secret Shopping Jobs

Secret shoppers are those professionals who get paid to visit various business locations and purchase products. Mystery shopping is conducted by large number of companies across various domains for evaluating their product and service standards. Companies generally hire reputed market research firms or mystery shopping companies who are into the mystery shopping field for a long time. These companies are given the responsibilities of designing effective brand evaluation assignments and hiring individuals for the same.

Mystery shoppers are required to behave as regular shoppers. The only thing that makes a mystery shopper different from a regular customer is that the former does not shop for his own requirements. In other words, mystery shoppers, posed as regular customers, need to keep an eye on factors, such as, outlet environment maintenance, product maintenance, conduct of the employees, etc. On reporting the observed details to the mystery shopping company, the mystery shopper gets paid. The payment terms vary from company to company. Some companies pay on a biweekly basis while others pay on a monthly basis. The payment policies can be confirmed before an individual finally signs up with a mystery shopping company.

Mystery shoppers not only get paid in cash and other rewards but can also enjoy various other benefits. Some of these benefits include, enjoying free lunch or dinner at restaurants, watching the latest movies in theatres for free, visiting amusement parks, staying in posh hotels and resorts free of charges, evaluating golf courses, apartments, etc. Some companies allow mystery shoppers to keep their product samples for free once the evaluation is successfully done. Hence, mystery shopping jobs are considered great sources of part-time or additional income.

Any individual looking for part-time income and willing to spend a few hours shopping can become a mystery shopper. Though one need not possess prior experience to become a mystery shopper, companies generally prefer to hire seasoned mystery shoppers. Nonetheless, once an individual enters this job field and gradually earns reputation with his dedicated performance, companies would assign him with some of the best and high paid mystery shopping tasks. Companies pay mystery shoppers because they are the ones who provide the former with unbiased feedback (from a customer’s viewpoint) on how their businesses are faring in the market. Mystery shopping not only highlights the business operations in the outlets but also brings forth many unattended issues that can be addressed to in a short time. As mentioned before, a mystery shopper needs to observe the various happenings in a store/outlet and note them down in a report – secretly!