ShopBust Hires Mystery Shoppers to Spy on Your Business

Singapore-based startup ShopBust offers an interesting way for shoppers to earn money by doing what they love the most, which is by shopping. How does the team do that? Founder Saad Kamal is now speaking onstage on our Startup Arena event, explaining how exactly the team aims to give money to shoppers all the while offering businesses some insights to its frontline activities.

The concept is quite simple, users first register as a ShopBust “mystery shopper” and then select an available assignment from the site. These assignments are scenarios that clients asked ShopBust do at selected retail outlets, with some of them include making purchases at the store. After the user gets approved for a particular assignment by the team, and have done the scenario, then the user will receive the “mystery shopping fee” which covers the purchase and a bit extra.

Typically, a regular mystery shopper will then review the store’s performance in areas such as staff appearance, friendliness, engagement, wait and service time, cleanliness, the store’s appearance, and overall on-site customer experience. The shoppers themselves will be curated based on location and social media profiling so that ShopBust’s clients get the kind of demographic the store owner wants to hear from.

Saad explains that they now have about 12,350 members to help run the startup’s operations in Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia. They have so far signed a couple of clients in the region and got a deal to run a pilot with two big fast-moving consumer goods brands and consumer electronics brand.

So far, ShopBust’s private beta is now operating in Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The team’s concept has received a good response so far, encouraging more than 12,000 people to sign up to be a mystery shopper.

Judge Nobuaki Kitagawa asked how they can convince retailers better than the current mystery shopping business models. Saad answered that they promise 48-hour full report, rather than a 10 to 12 weeks traditional reporting time. He added that they promise real-time data to clients.

When asked by judge Yasuhiko Yurimoto asked how they can convince retailers to use ShopBust’s services, Saad explained that it isn’t that hard to do so because retailers are already familiar with mystery shopping business model, ShopBust can simply do it better with more technology behind it.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.