If spending a day at the mall or grocery store is your idea of a great time, you should know that you can get paid to shop.
More than half a dozen sites recruit part-time shoppers either to buy things for others or to review the shopping experience. Some of them also pay well.
Where can you get paid to shop?
Mystery shopping
A wide range of consumer experience companies enlist mystery shoppers to assess how well company employees treat customers. Depending on the assignment, you can be paid in cash, merchandise, meals, or a combination of all three.
However, not all mystery companies are the same. Some offer relatively pleasant work that pays reasonably well, while others find every excuse not to pay at all.
Among the best options for mystery shoppers is a site called Service Rating Concepts. Service Evaluation Concepts pays between $15 and $100 per gig. In some cases, the shopper will also get merchandise – often alcohol or tobacco – as part of the deal.
All stores require some unpaid training that includes reading about what the customer is trying to achieve and taking a quiz to make sure you understand the material. However, the training is not extensive and the gig pay seems to take unpaid time into account.
Mystery meals
If you are a foodie who likes to eat out in nice places, you should also know about EyeSpy. This mystery shopping company specializes in hospitality, so most “shops” involve eating and drinking at nice restaurants or ordering from DoorDash.
The downside to EyeSpy is that the meal is your compensation. In most cases, you don’t get paid in cash — just reimbursed for what you spent. That said, restaurant shopping often involves going to nice places, ordering drinks and a full meal, including appetizers and dessert. If you love eating out, this job compensates you with a nice hourly equivalent in food and drink. We estimate the value of what you get per hour is between $35 – $50.
Other mystery shopping
It’s worth noting that each mystery shopping company has a specialty, which you’ll see in the type of stores they outsource most often. Some are more retail-oriented — having shoppers buy shoes, music or movies in a retail environment. Others specialize in movie theaters, spas, or business services.
Because mystery shoppers generally don’t pay much, much of the value of attending these concerts is the concert itself. Do you love movies? Consider Marketforce, whose mystery shoppers often get assignments in theaters. (But watch the rules carefully. One mistake with this site and your payment is at risk.)
Need an oil change? SecretShopper has a contract with Discount Tire Centers that reimburses shoppers up to $70 for an oil change or tire rotation and provides a $10 subsidy.
Do you like getting your eyebrows done? Consider BestMark, which invites mystery shoppers to visit a hair removal salon for a free service, plus a $35 payment.
Shopping
You can also get paid to shop for groceries.
Four sites — Instacart, Shipt, Spark and Dumpling — are all recruiting freelancers to shop for groceries and deliver them.
The dumpling is our favorite of the four. However, it’s best to use it in conjunction with either Shipt or Instacart. We do not recommend Spark.
To explain, let’s start with how each of these companies works.
Instacart
Instacart gives shoppers two options. They can be shoppers in the store, writing grocery orders for others to deliver. Or it can be a full service buyer.
In-store shoppers are Instacart employees. They earn at least minimum wage, but are subject to a regular schedule. Full-service buyers are independent contractors who are paid a delivery fee and receive advice.
They can take any job open any time they choose to work. They may earn more than minimum wage — or less. It really depends mostly on how well the customers give.
Shipt works like full-service shopping for Instacart. You are paid a delivery fee and a tip. You can take on jobs or delegate them and work whenever you want.
Spark
The Spark has almost the same set-up as the other two. However, the site allows customers to cancel their tips after their groceries have been delivered. Of course, if a freelancer were to get a gig based on a big promising tip, that looks like a bait-and-switch scam.
Sure, it would make sense to void a tip if the delivery driver provided terrible service. But Spark doesn’t require any explanation or put any restrictions on “hint baiting”. Notably, Instacart once had a similar policy. But the anger of drivers caused the company to change. Now, if a customer cancels a tip without explanation, Instacart will tip the driver $10 regardless.
Location control
In all three cases, purchase orders are controlled by the website. Drivers for Instacart, Shipt, and Spark cannot build a relationship directly with customers. They just take a look at what gigs are available when they want to work. how much they get paid to shop for any order and assess whether it’s worth it to accept the gig.
A kind of pasta
Dumpling is another story. This website does not control the customer relationship. It simply helps independent freelancers build a shopping business by providing them with a website and a credit card. Instead of setting prices and paying buyers a set fee, buyers set their own prices and, ideally, build their own regular clientele. This gives them more flexibility to shop when it’s most convenient for them.
However, you need to be more entrepreneurial in finding your customers when working through Dumpling. This is one of the reasons why it is smart to use this site in conjunction with one of the others. That way, if you deliver an Instacart order to someone who’s nice and tipsy, you can leave your Dumpling business card and suggest that they contact you directly the next time they need something.
Because you build the relationship directly with the customer here, you also have the ability to expand the type of purchases you make and where you shop. You can also group orders to earn more per hour. For example, you can tell your patrons that you go to Costco on Mondays. Macy’s on Tuesdays; BevMo on Wednesdays and HomeDepot on Fridays.
By taking multiple orders for the same locations, you can lower delivery fees for your customers and earn more per hour than if you were shopping one order at a time.
