Hey it’s Alison here,

If you are considering secret shopper employment I’m really pleased you’ve found this website and highly recommend you  keep reading to the end because this is a “warts and all” tale of the ups and downs and of course the happy ending about how I became a mystery shopper. If you’re in a rush you can click here to see the agency I finally settled with.

I used to work in a medium sized corporation as a credit controller until I finished work to start a family. After raising the children for a few years I resumed some sort of normal life  and I wanted to work again.

Looking for work again ….

I wanted a job part time ideally but I was in for a big shock when I started looking for work again. In my original line of work nobody seemed interested in employing someone with family commitments like mine, I got rejection after rejection. I was starting to feel really low and worthless after a couple of months. I needed to work and feel the sense of achievement again. I also wanted to see my children grow up so full time employment was not an option for me. I went for interview after interview and got the same old responses every time Which were either nothing at all or a letter of rejection. The main problem was the hours I was willing to work I guess. In short I wanted the dream job, work when I want and earn decent money in return.

I needed an alternative …

I started looking for an alternatives and I had heard about secret shopping from friends who work in stores so I decided to start searching for any agencies and vacancies to find out how I could become a mystery shopper. What a mine field it turned out to be! There are lots of agencies out there and they are not all what they suggest they are on their brochures or web site. The main problem is sorting the good ones from the bad ones. I registered for several initially starting with free ones only to find they either wanted to charge me money or were trying to scam me. then I paid for a couple of other agencies only to find the work they offered wasn’t really in my area and the other one was so restricted I wasn’t earning any profit.  Mystery shopping was starting to wear me out!

A TV show was my saviour…

Then one day on ABC there was an article about mystery shopping and my ears pricked. It mentioned a company and I thought this has to be worth a look.  Within an hour I popped on to their web site and had a good read through all the content. Remember I had been bitten before so I was being a more cautious than most would.  Within fifteen minutes  I was signing up for a position with them. My stomach was churning because I was desperate not to be scammed again, my husband would be furious so I never told him for a month! I needn’t have worried in the slightest, by the next day I was ready to go and had evaluation assignments waiting for me up to 8 weeks ahead. In fact, I had more work  than I wanted but it didn’t matter, I don’t have to take any of the requests remember. It’s not like being told by your boss to do something, it’s a list of jobs you have the option to take. I did get a bit greedy at first to get some money together for a vacation but then I settled it down to working a little at weekends (usually meals out with the family evaluations or car hire) and I work a couple of days in the week doing department store evaluations. It’s my dream job.

Are there any bad points I hear you ask?..

Nothing is ever perfect and we all know that in life there will always be something that we would like to change. The one thing that I wasn’t keen on, and this applies to all of the secret shopper companies, was that I had to pay a small admin fee to sign up for work. I needn’t have worried though, my agency more than paid for the fee in the first assignment so I soon forgot about that.

The really good news is…

I didn’t want to end on bad points so I thought I would give you the major positives which are:

The Demand for Mystery Shoppers is Growing Exponentially
It’s $1.5  billion industry and still growing
Everything you buy on your assignment you keep. (I put unwanted items on eBay)
You can take your spouse or kids on assignment with you if you wish
Flexible Working Hours

I hope you have found my story useful.

Click here to visit the agency I recommend. 

Wishing you every success and happiness,
Alison.