Mystery Shopping for a Living

The decision to step out of the working world and become a work at home mom is a big one. But one of the many advantages is that it gives you a chance to reevaluate what you do for a living and use this big life change to start a new career doing something you love. There is one undiscovered gem job that works perfectly for a work-at-home mom and that is shopping for a living. But to the people who are employing you, they would call it "mystery shopping".

A mystery shopper is essentially a spy. The job is relatively easy to understand. Your employer will contract with you to go to a location and shop for a specified product or service. The point is not the shopping or the buying. The point is the information you will gain which is valuable to your employer because it is great corporate intelligence on what the competition is doing.

Many times a retailer will hire a mystery shopper to go to a store with a set budget and buy specific items using funds provided by the employer. In some cases, you are permitted to keep the items you shop for as part of your compensation. But in most cases, you deliver the products to the employer along with your receipt and an evaluation sheet with questions about your foray into the world of mystery shopping.

This is an outstanding work at home opportunity for a mom who needs some income but needs a job that can be molded around the needs of your children and their schedules. On any given day, you may have one or maybe several mystery shopping trips to conduct. But you can arrange those trips around taking the kids to school or playgroup. In fact, you can even take your children with you and blend right in. The store you are "spying" on would never suspect a mom with a fussy baby or two of being a mystery shopper in the store gathering data for their competition.

In some cases, a mystery shopper does not shop to check out prices or the quality of product and the assignment might not be to shop the competition. Instead, you may shop the stores that are owned by your employer. You will be given a checklist to report on which will include the cleanliness of the store, how well stocked the store is, how a random employee responded to your request for help, the condition of the bathrooms and how well the checkout process went. You are still shopping but you are there to "tattle" on your shopping experience. What an ideal gig for a mom because as a homemaker, you are an expert at evaluating how well people provide service for your family.

Mystery shopping has also evolved into the digital age as well. Since so many people now do their shopping online, internet merchants are hiring mystery shoppers to use their websites and report on how well the buying experience went when you shopped for products they sell online. You might evaluate how easy it was for you to navigate the website, if the links from page to page work, if the website was fast and if the colors, text and layout of the website made you want to shop there again.

Mystery shopping in cyberspace might also include monitoring the online stores of the competition to report when they lowered their prices or when the website was improved so your employer can keep pace with other internet merchants and retain their customer base.

Mystery shopping is not a work at home job that many people know about. Part of the reason for that is that moms who land mystery shopper jobs keep quiet about it to keep the secret to themselves. But now that we have spilled the beans, you can get out there and land a fun and lucrative job shopping for a living.