How to become a mystery shopper

Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch? Companies use mystery shoppers and mystery diners to evaluate the level of service that is being provided in their stores. The work is normally out sourced to 3rd party promotional and field marketing agencies who specialise in this kind of thing.

The kind of work you could be expected to do varies from having a meal in a restaurant, to going into a shop and enquiring about or purchasing a product or service. Where you are a mystery diner you get the cost of your meal reimbursed. When you purchase a product you will occasionally get to keep the product, along with being compensated for your time.

Additionally, when companies are running promotional campaigns they often need people to mystery shop the promotional staff to make sure they are doing their jobs properly.

You could almost look at it like being a secret agent, or your could be sensible about it. Either way, if you would like to get involved in mystery shopping or mystery dining work, here are some agencies who run mystery shopper campaigns:

JKS Mystery Shopping
Retail Maxim
Macpherson Group
Market Public
Zoo people
The Mystery Dining Company

Cash Ninja has not been able to verify the standard of these agencies so cannot provide any specific recommendations.

Sit an exam

Recently we have been sent details of a couple of mystery shopping jobs in the Cambridge area. To quote "The job will involve you going into a teaching exam and pulling out a calculator to cheat during a numeracy exam. The fee for the job is £22." It didn't sound very exciting, so we decided not to do it. However, they do appear to need people to do this kind of thing, so if you want to get involved, go to www.mystery-shoppers.co.uk

Radio 1

Radio 1 dj Scott Mills recently mentioned mystery shopping and mystery dining as ways of making money during the credit crunch. We didn't hear the full feature and we're not sure whether this site was mentioned but certainly the amount of traffic we got as a result of people searching for how to become a mystery shopper and other related searches was significant. So thanks Scott Mills and hopefully the information provided above was useful to all of those who visited.