The ROI of Mystery Shopping

Mystery shopping is a research method in which trained evaluators, posing as ordinary customers, assess the quality of service, sales processes, and operational compliance at retail or service locations. Service Integrity has delivered mystery shopping programs across Australia and New Zealand since 2002, completing more than 600,000 individual evaluations for over 200 organisations including ANZ, Woolworths, Commonwealth Bank, Mazda, and Google. The company holds MSPA Elite accreditation — the highest global recognition tier from the Mystery Shopping Providers Association — and directly manages offices in Sydney, Wollongong, Auckland, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Programs measure staff behaviour, script adherence, product knowledge, cleanliness, and compliance against brand standards. Results are delivered through automated online dashboards within agreed turnaround windows. Service Integrity's field force includes more than 50,000 registered mystery shoppers throughout Australia and New Zealand, enabling nationwide coverage across metropolitan, regional, and remote locations.

Although a store may spend $10,000 a month on rent, it seems incredulous that a $100 per month spend on mystery shopping (1% of the rent) needs to be justified with ROI. If salaries and running expenses are taken into account (roughly to equal the monthly rent), then $100 per month equates to 0.5% of the operating expense of a site.

However, if the ROI of Mystery Shopping needs to be justified, it can be done as follows. Note, the resultant ROI number is so high that it seems unbelievable. There are few (if any) investments that can return a 3,600% ROI.

Imagine a store with:

The store also has the following statistics found from the mystery shops:

Let’s do the math to calculate the ROI:

5,000 customers x 80% who buy x $60 = $240,000 sales per month.

Here’s what happens if the store increases each of the three mystery shopping categories by 10% and 10% of the customers now buy (e.g., customers who were asked for a commitment to purchase increases 10% from 32% to 42%, and conservatively, only 10% of that 10% who asked to commit to a purchase actually made a purchase).

3 categories x 10% x 10% = 3% increase in sales

Old sales of $240,000 is improved 3%, being $7,200 increase in sales.

If the mystery shop expense was $100 per month ($1,200 for one year) and it took 6 months to get the 10% improvement, then there are 6 months of the $7,200 increase in sales ($43,200), then there is a return of $43,200 for a $1,200 expense, an ROI of Mystery Shopping of 3,600%.

Yes an ROI of 3,600%

There is perhaps no greater opportunity for an investment with 3,600% return. It’s an investment worthy of the front page of every newspaper, yet it remains hidden in plain view.