by Tricia Chaves

Created on: February 17, 2009

Mystery shopping can be a great way to supplement your income, or even make a living. It can be a part time job that will allow you and your family access to free tickets to the zoo, ballpark, bowling alley and even resorts. You can get reimbursed for necessities like groceries, oil changes and pet food just for sharing your experience.

How to Get Started

The first step to becoming a mystery shopper is to get hired by a mystery shopping company. You'll see that there are tons of mystery shopping companies out there servicing all the industries you can imagine. It's an arduous task to apply to each and every company out there, but I've come up with some time-saving

tips to help streamline the process.

Where to Apply

A fellow mystery shopper named Kim, "The Mystery Shopping Mom" writes a newsletter where she shared the most comprehensive list of mystery shopping companies I've seen. She also shared a single form that will submit your application to 77 different companies...a great way to get started right away. Jacob Jans, another mystery shopper shared a list of even more companies on his blog. While these lists cover the a lot of companies, you can look to sites like Shadow Shopper, Volition and Jobslinger, which are job boards. These can be really helpful when you want to find new assignments and companies to work for.

Keeping it All Together

Break these lists into small segments and apply to a couple whenever you have a few spare minutes. It's a lot of ground to cover, but use the shortcuts I've suggested and you'll eventually get through it. The more companies you apply to, the better your chances for getting a higher quantity and more diverse assignments. Be sure to keep yourself organized right from the beginning. If you make a note of each company you apply to right away, along with their payment terms and how jobs offers are sent, it will save you a lot of time later.

The majority of companies send job offers via email. Your email program should have a setting that allows you to automatically sort email you receive into folders. I've found it particularly helpful to create three folders in my email labeled: New Shop Opportunities, Assigned Shops and Completed Shops. My email is set so that any message that arrives with the words "shops" or "mystery shop" in the subject line is automatically sent to the folder called New Shop Opportunities.

If I receive mystery shopping messages that don't get grabbed that way, I move them into the folder and then add a rule for individual senders in my email settings as needed. This is a huge time saver when I just want to log in and check my email to see what shop opportunities are available. I can see right away when new jobs are listed without sifting through every message in my inbox.

When I've accepted an assignment, I move any emails pertaining to it into my Assigned Shops folder. Then once I've completed an assignment, everything is moved from the Assigned Shops folder to the Completed Shops folder. It's that easy. Follow that system and you'll know right where to go anytime you have questions about a shop or need to find contact information for a company or scheduler.

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