What’s the Truth about Mystery Shopping, After All?
Found this nice article:

There’s been a heated rhetoric intended to subdue the marketing hype that certain companies or online marketing gurus create around mystery shopping. However, when taking the middle stance between the pro-campaigning and the outright denunciation of mystery shopping as a legitimate and effective market research practice, we realize that mystery shopping is not bad, after all, because it provides unique product and service insights that no other market research method can produce. For mystery shoppers, it’s not simply a great cash-earning opportunity, but also a way to make a difference in customer service and product marketing.

Certainly, mystery shopping has elbowed its way to proving as a legitimate and smart way of earning extra money. It has many critics claiming that mystery shopping is not profitable, and that quite on the contrary – pays too little for the workload that mystery shoppers take on. However, many of the allegedly experienced critics of mystery shopping were either lousy shoppers themselves, or are simply reproducing comments that they overheard from somewhere. Successful mystery shoppers certainly develop some skills to sift through the shopping opportunities they are offered, but these take some time and practice.

Mystery shopping jobs attracts many job seekers, because it requires no previous experience, while providing an exciting and challenging environment as mystery shoppers are actors, market researchers, and objective evaluators all rolled into one. There’s no monotonous work routine with mystery shopping, but it is far from requiring no effort and time. Successful mystery shoppers develop professional ethics and build good reputation with the companies they work for, and that ensures them regular assignments and higher-paid shops. Mystery shopping is definitely rewarding – not only do you get paid, receive free services and merchandise, but also you leave your shop location with the satisfaction that you have contributed to improving a product or service for all customers that will be using it.

Complete article here : http://www.secretwebshopper.com/articles/truth_about_mystery_shopping.jsp