How Mystery Shoppers May Be Shooting Themselves in the Foot

Some mystery shoppers truly do take a casual approach to their assignments. They may pick up a few assignments here and there to fill up their free time in a fun and lucrative way. Others, however are trying to earn a certain amount of money each month, and they may rely on mystery shopping to make ends meet. If you fall into the latter group, you no doubt want to…

Strategies for Making Phone Assignments Work For You

With gas prices continuing to rise, and in some parts of the country exceeding $4 per gallon, many mystery shoppers are trying to find ways to cut back on travel costs. For many, this means finding assignments that are located closer to home, and it also means picking up an extra gas station assignment or two so you can get at least a little bit of free gas (or at…

Save Time and Money By Working on Easy Mystery Shopping Assignments (and How to Find Them!)

The fact is that not all mystery shopping assignments are created equal. Some will take you less than thirty minutes to complete and will pay you quite nicely for your efforts. Others will take a long time to complete and will have an expensive required purchase with adequate compensation. In fact, if you aren’t careful, you may end up losing money on some assignments! As a mystery shopper, it is…

How to Pick and Choose the Best Mystery Shopping Assignments

All mystery shopping assignments are not created equal. Some assignments are located right around the corner from you while others are a 20 minute drive away. Some assignments will compensate you for a required purchase on groceries or other necessities while others will compensate you on a required purchase of a knick knack or other unwanted item. And even other assignments will pay you a nice wage for easy requirements…

Forgot an Assignment Requirement? Helpful Strategies For Saving Your Paycheck

Have you ever gotten home from completing a mystery shopping assignment’s site visit and realized that you forgot to complete one aspect of the requirements? Or perhaps your site visit was interrupted in some fashion, such as a noisy customer or a cunning employee who was about to discover your identity as a mystery shopper, and you had to run out of the location right away to save the assignment….

How Expert Mystery Shoppers Handle Tricky Timed Assignments

There is no question about it – timed assignments can be really difficult to do. Most assignments will ask you to take note of the time you entered and left the store. Keeping track of this basic information while you store away all of the other details of the site visit in your brain can be hard enough. But when an assignment requires you to pay extra attention to various timing…

Complete More Assignments In Less Time With These Simple Mystery Shopping Tips

Many mystery shoppers enter the business in large part due to the ability to control their own schedules. Mystery shoppers are able to set their own work hours, working as much or as little as they want. At first glance, your income as a mystery shopper may seem unlimited. However, there are only so many hours in the day to complete assignments, not to mention take care of all of…

What You Need To Know Before Your Next Mystery Shopping Assignment

Mystery shopping may seem like a pretty easy gig to get the hang of. After you’ve completed even a few assignments, it’s pretty easy to think you’ve got this job figured out. It’s easy to full into a rut and shift into auto-pilot mode. If you find yourself completing assignment after assignment without putting much thought into it, you may be passing up on great opportunities to take your mystery…

How Much Work Is Too Much Work For One Assignment?

The answer to that question for most mystery shoppers can be summed up with another question, “How much am I getting paid to do the work?”  There is, of course, more to an assignment than how long  your assignment takes. For instance, if you spend an hour scouring the provider’s job boards to find one assignment, that is an hour that you can a lot to the time  you spent…

How Mystery Shopping Assumptions Can Lead To Wasted Time And Lost Money

In mystery shopping, as in many other careers, time is money. If you are spending too much time working on one assignment, you are wasting money. Many mystery shoppers learn right from the start that in order to make the most money at this job, you have to work fast while still retaining your attention to detail. However, there is a fine balance between working fast and attentively versus working…