Selecting Shopping Assignments

Once you apply with all of the companies listed, you must be patient. There are several factors which will affect how quickly you are offered assignments: the location and size of your town or city, the number of qualified shoppers in your area and your experience and background. Keep in mind the more experience you get the more assignments you will be offered. It is typical for someone to start off with 1 assignment per week and as they gain more experience it is not unusual for some shoppers to be offered 15-20 assignments per week.

Do not become discouraged if you apply with all of the companies on the list and several weeks pass by without receiving any assignment offers. Remember that once you apply you will be added to a database of available shoppers in your area so that as soon as assignments are available in your area you will likely be contacted.

You may want to select jobs that are in the rural areas. Make a day trip of it. The rural jobs do not go as quickly as the city jobs. Schedulers take notice of shoppers who are willing to go the extra mile to help out.

When you gain some experience and are offered more assignments you should be careful not to take on more than you can handle. Remember, you are your own boss, you make the schedule. When they first get into this industry many people find that they have difficulty with this, they are very eager to accept all assignments and end up taking on more than they can handle at times. For example if you are offered 20 assignments in a 5 day period, each assignment involves ½ hour of traveling time and 2 hours to complete the assignment and report you are looking at a total of total of 50 hours, this would be 10 hours/day! If you do not have many family or personal responsibilities outside of work this may be fine for you but this would be too much for most people to handle.

It is also important to be very organized when you are completing multiple assignments in a short time period. A tool that can help you to do this is a simple scheduling tool called an assignment log. It is very important to track details for each shop such as mileage, this tool will help you to do this easily. It is especially important to accurately log your mileage for assignments which will not reimburse you for travel time because you can deduct this as an expense when filing your income tax return (for more on taxes see the “Getting Paid” section below). If you have downloaded Adobe Acrobat, click the link below for a PDF version of an assignment log.

 

Interested in finding out more? Please read all about it in our "Pocket Guide to Secret Shopping" Over 200 Companies listed that actively seek out secret shoppers. These companies contact you for shopping jobs and you can pick and choose the ones you want to go on. It's that easy! Written by a person who DOES this for a living. The book reveals all you need to know about secret shopping and gives you details of where to and how to apply for best results. "I receive several emails per week to evaluate different places! It's really amazing and I even get to pick and choose which places I want to evaluate. There's no charge, no obligation, and I get paid to do what I would be doing anyway!"