Mystery shopping : Informations

Locations

The most common venues to be mystery shopped are retail stores, fast food, and banks. Virtually any context where there is a customer/business interaction is open to mystery shopping, including on-line surveys. More and more companies are beginning to see the value in expeirence measurment techniques such as mystery shopping, and as such larger organisations such as Hotels, Retail Chains, and even Airlines have engaged companies for these purposes.

Pay

Pay is highly variable, depending on the company facilitating the mystery shop, the experience level of the mystery shopper, availability of mystery shoppers in the area, and shop being tested. Novice mystery shoppers can earn less than minimum wage after accounting for time and cost involved to perform the scenario. Mystery shoppers must read and understand the requirements of the client. Gas mileage to and from the store is not usually reimbursed. Many scenarios involving the purchase and return of an item require the mystery shopper to wait for an uncompensated period of minutes or hours before they can return the item purchased.

In the case of unreturnable services, such as a meal at a restaurant or an evening's stay at a hotel, mystery shoppers receive the unreturnable service as their sole compensation. Reports on restaurant and hotel assignments can be much more detailed than other shopping reports, and can take hours to complete.

Statistics

The Mystery shopping industry had an estimated value of nearly $600 million in the United States in 2004[1], according to a 2005 report commissioned by the Mystery Shopping Providers Association (MSPA). Companies that participated in the report experienced an average growth of 11.1 percent from 2003 to 2004, compared to an average growth of 12.2 percent. The report estimates more than 8.1 million mystery shops were conducted in 2004. The Report represents the first industry association attempt to quantify the size of the mystery shopping industry.Similar surveys are available for EUROPE where mystery shopping is becomming more embedded into company procedures

Ethics

Mystery Shoppers are always bound by a relevant set of rules or ethics code. The most widely used set of professional guidelines and ethics standards for the industry is ISO 20252 - Market, opinion and social research, that was ratified by TC 225 in 2006.

Fraud

Scams exist that lure unsuspecting consumers into paying money to learn how to become a mystery shopper, even though this information is widely available on the Internet. There are many Internet discussion groups dedicated to mystery shopper information and opportunities.

There another scam that uses mystery shopping as a premise for fraud, where a person is sent a bad check with a request to deposit it into their bank account, wire a portion of the money through a wire transfer company such as Western Union and keep the remainder as a mystery shopping fee, and informed to mail the money immediately as the test is evaluating response time. People who wire the "remainder" discover the check is bad and lose the money they transfer and the wire transfer service fee.

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