Mystery Shopping: 3 Tips For Being A More Efficient Mystery Shopper

The best way to make more money as a mystery shopper is to set up an efficient work process for yourself so you can pick up assignments more quickly and complete them easily. So here are my tips to getting things done. A couple of them you'll need to do before you even get started signing up for mystery shopping companies.

1. Set up a New Email Address
Since you'll need to sign up with as many companies as possible in order to maximize your income opportunities to get mystery shopping assignments, the first thing you should do is set up a new email account and only use that account for work. Since I do retail merchandising and some online 'get paid to" stuff as well, I use one gmail account for all three and then set up labels for the different types of work I do. I have labels for "mystery shopping", "merchandising" and "paid surveys" (I just lump all the "get paid to" stuff under that). I also have labels for "pending" and "completed". This way when I check my email each day, I can quickly scan what I need to do next without hunting through the dozens of emails. If you set up the account to automatically route mail from certain email addresses to a particular label, all of your new mail will be prelabeled as it arrives.

2. Get some Form Filler software
You will be signing up with a lot of companies. Some mystery shoppers sign up with over 100. It is very tedious and time consuming to do all of this by hand, so get yourself some form completion software and use it. I personally use Roboform because it doesn't have any spyware or adware installed with it, but there are lots of different form completer's available.

3. Organize your bookmarks
Some of the mystery shopping companies always send out emails with newly available assignments, but a lot of them don't so you'll need to log into their websites every day in order to get your jobs. Most mystery shopping jobs are first come, first serve so if you want that assignment, you need to work efficiently. There's a couple of ways of doing this. If you use a tabbed browser, set up your bookmarks so that you can open about 10 websites at a time with one click. Another alternative is to use a start page such as Pageflakes, Netvibes or iGoogle and add all of your mystery shopping companies to your start page bookmarks. But one of the best ideas is to set up a spreadsheet with clickable links -- that way not only do you have quick & easy access to all your companies, but you have all of your information about them to hand (i.e. your scheduler, pending assignments, completed assignments, pending payments, etc.)

That's it! You're all organized. Now get out and shop!