When you think about the skills you need to be a mystery shopper, you may think about skills and qualities like being detail-oriented, being able to write reports fast and without errors, having a great memory, and even being a people-person who likes to get out there and interact with the various employees and managers you deal with at site visits. One of the qualities you probably do not think…
Why You Need to Join an Online Mystery Shoppers Forum
More and more people are discovering how they can stay connected to friends and family through social media websites like Twitter and Facebook, and the fact is that there are also websites that allow you to network with your mystery shopping peers and colleagues, too. Mystery shopping has traditionally been a fairly isolated type of job, where you work on your own typically with your identity concealed. You may do…
Looking for the Best Mystery Shopping Providers? Hot Tips to Help
In just about every type of job, who you work for can really make a big difference in how happy you are working every day. This is no different for mystery shopping, either. The fact is that with mystery shopping you are a contract worker, and so you have incredible flexibility over which providers you work for. Yet some mystery shoppers, for whatever reason, feel as though they are trapped…
Cast the Winter Blahs Away With These Fun Spring Assignments
It has been a long and bitterly cold winter for many mystery shoppers, but the good news is that spring is finally here! The snow and ice are melting, the birds are chirping, and in some places even a little bit of spring greenery is adding fresh brilliance to what has otherwise been a barren landscape for months. Now is the perfect time to get into the spirit of spring…
Finding the Value in Low-Paying Assignments
So many mystery shoppers today complain about the low level of compensation that many assignments pay. It’s hard to blame them because, after all, who wouldn’t be insulted at earning $15 or less for two hours of their time for travel, the site visit, and report writing, too. This barely meets the equivalent of minimum wage. Today many far less skilled jobs like bagging groceries and scooping fries in a…
3 Tips for Fast and Easy Report Writing
Mystery shopping is just like any other job, giving people things to truly love and honestly dislike about their job duties. For most mystery shoppers, the site visits are the best part of the job. Every day and every assignment brings you new experiences and takes you to different locales. Not far behind are the reimbursements you get on your purchases. High on the dislike column, though, is the requirement…
An Interview with Consumer Impressions Mystery Shopping
I recently had the opportunity to ask Jodi Paul a few questions about her mystery shopping company. If you’re looking for a great company to work with, I highly recommend signing up for Consumer Impressions. Please give a short introduction to your company: Consumer Impressions, Inc. is headquartered in Plano, Texas. We have been providing mystery shopping services since 1991. We focus mainly on fast food, but also do fine…
How Many Mystery Shopping Assignments Is Too Many?
If you know other mystery shoppers personally or even if you have visited the mystery shopping forums online, you no doubt have heard others talk about completing an astronomical number of assignments in a given day or week. You may struggle to do half as many as they do in the same amount of time. It can really be mind boggling to try to think about doing so many assignments,…
How Mystery Shoppers Can Get Paid Faster
Get to mystery shoppers together in a room – or in a virtual room online, and they most certainly will gripe about how hard it is to get some providers to pay them in an timely manner. (And sometimes even to get them to pay at all!) Sometimes the griping on this topic even turns competitive as mystery shoppers try to out-do each other with the worst payment horror story…
Are You Being Targeted By A Scam? What Every Mystery Shopper Needs to Know
On the home page of a local chapter of the Better Business Bureau, the BBB itself says that mystery shopping is one of the biggest scams targeting people who want to work from home today. Clicking their link, you find an article that lists mystery shopping as a whole as a scam rather than the scam artists targeting mystery shopping. This unfortunate and erroneous article posted by one of the…