Mystery shopping seems to be a mystery to a lot of people, and it has a lot of myths surrounding it. These are five myths we’ve heard over and over again.
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- Mystery shopping is not a cake walk. A lot of people may think it is just a matter of showing up somewhere and making sure the product was good and the people were nice. There are numerous things that can be evaluated in detail and those things can change from assignment to assignment. So, perhaps the first myth is that mystery shopping is easy. It absolutely is not. It requires a high level of dependability and strong attention to detail.
- You can’t make a living doing this from home. Some people might think you can do this by sitting at home and calling people or recalling places you visited in the past. That certainly isn’t true. Nor is it true that you will get high paying assignments among your first ones. Your first assignments are going to be opportunities to prove your dependability and professionalism, and you’ll get better assignments from there.
- Mystery shopping is not easy money. Another myth is that you are going to make a ‘ton of money’ doing it. You won’t. Those that make a living doing mystery shopping are on the road a lot, and work as much as sixty hours a week. This is no different than any other job you want to succeed in: if you work hard, invest the time, and do a good job, you can make money. But don’t expect to not to have to work.
- You can’t fake a shop. People often think they can game the system or fabricate results of a mystery shopping experience when they never actually did the work. Anyone that thinks we aren’t good at ferreting out that is fooling themselves. There is accountability to the clients who contract out for mystery shopping services and not only do we need to hold the shoppers accountable for doing the work, but those clients will hold us accountable. There are ways to know or find out if the assignment was completed or not.
- Mystery shopping is not a great job for people who “love to shop.” I hear from a lot of people who think this is a job where you can just visit your favorite shops and get paid for it. It’s not like that at all. We have clients who want us to visit their particular store, perform a specific transaction, and give us specific information. It’s just not that kind of shopping.
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