Excellent compensation, a quality venue and easy instructions are three of the top things most mystery shoppers look for in their mystery shopping assignments. In some cases, factors like a popular venue or higher compensation will make assignments that fall short in other areas desirable to work on. However, if you are like so many other mystery shoppers, you may struggle to find a great assignment that meets even one of these criteria. You may have wondered why it is so difficult to find quality assignments. There are a few key reasons why you may not be able to find assignments that appeal to you.
Slow Response
Some of the most coveted assignments are often snatched up by eager mystery shoppers within just a few minutes of being posted on job boards. If you want to get your hands on assignments that pay well, that are in popular shops and restaurants or that have less cumbersome instructions, you will need to be first to the job boards. You can make an effort to check your email more frequently so that you are alerted to new job postings. You can also check the job boards directly several times per day to ensure you don’t miss out on the best assignments.
Few and Far Between
If you feel like the top mystery shopping assignments are few and far between, you are not alone. The fact is that assignments as popular restaurants, shops and more are great to work on because you may be familiar with them or may be able to think of a million things you can put the expense reimbursement to use for. However, for every popular restaurant, store and more out there, there are a dozen others that are not quite as popular. These assignments may be excellent assignments, and you simply not recognize them for what they are. If you are unfamiliar with a venue, simply take a few minutes to search for it online. With this effort, you may find out that a less desirable assignment actually is pretty desirable after all.
Compensation Analysis
Some mystery shoppers are in the habit of simply skimming over the base pay on assignments in search of the assignments that pay the most. However, the base pay often is not fully representative of how profitable an assignment may be for you. Consider that the total compensation for an assignment is dependent on your expense reimbursement, how effectively you use that expense reimbursement, the tax write-off for business miles traveled and any other expenses that can be written off for the assignment. How you analyze the assignments can play a big factor in how desirable an assignment may be for you. With further analysis of the compensation of various assignments, you may realize that you have been passing up on assignments that actually are very lucrative after all.
On the surface, quality mystery shopping assignments can be very difficult to find. However, with further inspection, you may discover that some of the assignments that at first appear to be duds actually can be easy, enjoyable and rather profitable assignments to work on!
I am so glad I decided to contact the scheduler for one shop I was reading about. I didn’t think the thirty dollars per hour was anything except a typo. The dollar figure was true, and also paid $0.555 per mile, $25 per hour after 1.5 hours of driving. The first week netted me $371 for less than 8 hours onsite. The next week I have earned $1,300.00 for fifteen jobs in one week. This was for 18.5 hours onsite.