Earning a part time income from mystery shopping and merchandising
Just about all of us have received scam emails for mystery shopping opportunities.
These emails promise pretty big dollars for easy work and often request we apply by sending our contact info to some throwaway email address to "apply".
If you've been around long enough, you know these are scams and ignore them.
Perhaps you've wondered if there are legitimate mystery shopping jobs out there. Yes, there are.
Even though there are people who actually do mystery shopping and merchandising full time, that's a very tough thing to put together due to the somewhat sporadic nature of these opportunities and the local competition for them.
However, for those who need to find some additional money to help meet their bills or to afford internet tools and training, you might find that doing assignments part time can help you achieve that.
Here are just 3 places to find honest mystery shopping or merchandising opportunities:
Volition - Volition claims "We are the oldest Free Stuff site on the Internet." My interest when I found them was just for mystery shopping, so I haven't looked over everything there. For this topic, you want to start off on their Mystery Shopping page.
There, you will find links to mystery shopping companies, demo and merchandising companies, the Volition mystery shopping forum, and a few other links.
JobSlinger - JobSlinger will help you find mystery shopping and merchandising jobs in your area.
On the Volition site, there are links to hundreds of mystery shopping companies, but unless you register with a company, you won't know if they have local assignments. In my case, out of the 80+ companies I'm registered with, only about 10-20 have regular or fairly regular shops in my area.
JobSlinger will let you search by ZIP code to see if anything is avaible near you. However, to see specific details you would need to create a free account there.
World Alliance for Retail Excellence and Standards - This site was formerly known as NARMS - National Association for Retail Marketing Services. Yes, apparently they like having a really long company name. :)
WARES is a great place to search for temporary to permanent part-time and full-time merchandising jobs.
If mystery shopping or merchandising interests you, look around those three sites and see what they have to offer.
Feel free to post a comment if you have any questions or feedback.
Good luck and have a great day.
Recent Comments
6
Yes, it's good for pocket money. Each job pays small, for the most part, but if you do several shops a day, you can make gas money. I did it years ago.
Thanks for the comment Carla.
I'm not currently doing any shops or merchandising assignments, but when I did, I would organize things by ZIP code to keep jobs close together and as profitable as possible.
For those who pursue it, it's also good to keep an eye out as the schedulers get desperate. That's when they add the lovely bonuses on.
One company I'm registered with does gas station shops and the pay and reimbursement is pathetically low. So they almost always had quite a few left over as the deadline approached. At that point, the pay would go from $3-$5 up to $20-$40. That's when I would create a route and earn a couple hundred for the day.
Other than that, it can be good for a free meal, a night out with the significant other at a decent restaurant, a trip to a ballgame or amusement park, etc. Things that some people may not have in their budget due to their financial circumstances.
That's what I used to do, too. The recruiters would be desperately begging and I would reply that MAYBE I could do it, I'd have to check. Then they would bombard me with private emails raising the price in each one. LOL
See more comments
Sounds interesting. :)