Many mystery shoppers today have the desire to do their best work on their assignments from start to finish. Often, the level of work a mystery shopper does is reflected in their “shopper rating.” This rating may affect your ability to get assignments in the future, including the number of assignments, the quality of assignments, and higher paying assignments, too. If your rating is too low, you may not be…
Is This a Scam?: What to Look For
Most mystery shoppers become aware of just a few of the scams targeting the mystery shopping industry before they even do their first assignment. There are numerous websites online that offer you mystery shopping training for a fee, a mystery shopping license, and a list of mystery shopping providers for a fee as well. Of course, you don’t a license or special training to be a mystery shopper, and the…
Which Mystery Shopping Assignments Are Most Worth Your Time?
When you first started out mystery shopping, you may have browsed eagerly through the assignments posted on the job boards in search of great assignments at popular venues. You may have opted for assignments at restaurants and stores you know and love, or may have tried to get assignments at places you’ve wanted to go to before but just never had the opportunity to visit. Many new mystery shoppers don’t…
Get Your Mystery Shopping Career Off to a Profitable Start
If you are like most people, mystery shopping is one of those things that you heard mentioned casually here and there. It almost was like an urban legend rather than something people actually did. Yet you have now discovered that mystery shopping is a legitimate job that many people across the country and beyond do to make a part-time or even a full-time living at. Now that you have discovered…
How Mystery Shoppers Can Prevent Identity Theft
As with many things in life, the saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, certainly applies to identity theft, too. Identity theft is a growing problem today, with many thieves working to steal a person’s identity, open up new accounts, charge tremendous amounts of purchases under their name, and more. Many people learn about such charges when they randomly check their credit report, when they apply…
Time is Money: Are You an Efficient Mystery Shopper?
If you are like so many people, you no doubt can pinpoint a few of your more significant personality flaws. Perhaps you are a bit too shy, or you like to control the conversation a bit too much in social situations. Such flaws are rather easy to pinpoint, but it can be a bit more difficult to determine flaws you may have in a working environment. This is especially true…
When Mystery Shopping Providers Cross the Line: What Can You Do?
As mystery shoppers, we don’t often have much to complain about. We work from home, set our own work hours, and enjoy the luxury of picking and choosing the assignments we want to spend our time on. Yet if there is one complaint so many mystery shoppers have, it is when our providers cross the line and make demands on us that are just unreasonable or even unethical at times….
What’s Holding Up Your Mystery Shopping Paycheck?
If there is one thing that mystery shoppers complain about more than anything else, it is how slow their providers are to pay them for their services. If you are a mystery shopper yourself, you know that sometimes it can be weeks and even months before you get paid for an assignment. This can create a bookkeeping headache on your part as you try to keep tabs on payments for…
Why Every Mystery Shopper Needs to Join the Online Community
The world we live in today is becoming more digitized and remote with each passing day. Many years ago, mystery shopping was a far different world without online job boards and manual submission of reports. Communication with providers was often conducted with the phone, the fax machine, and even snail mail. Today, it is not uncommon for a mystery shopper to work on dozens of different assignments without any communication…
Maximizing Your Mystery Shopping Income in 2012
Who doesn’t want to make more money this year as a mystery shopper? The economy may be picking up steam, and many family budgets are easing up a bit in recent months, but that doesn’t mean mystery shoppers can’t use some extra cash this year! The good news is that there are several pretty easy things you can start doing today to really get the most money for your efforts….