mystery shopping

mystery shopping noun: the practice of using mystery shoppers to evaluate a business. Also the present participle and gerund of mystery shop.

Noun

mystery shopping (countable and uncountable, plural mystery shoppings)

The practice of using mystery shoppers to evaluate a business.
- Younkers, a midwestern department store chain, carries out 12,000 mystery shoppings a year in support of its Satisfaction Plus quality and productivity effort.1990, James L. Heskett, Service Breakthroughs
- We were also keen to learn more about “mystery shopping" (something that was popular in the United States) and how it might help us to provide specific 'service' related information to individual managers.1997, Peter Murley, Gower Handbook of Customer Service, page 151

mystery shopping is also the present participle and gerund of mystery shop.

Mystery shopping is used by many companies to assess the performance of their staff.2005, Alan Marvell, GCE AS Travel and Tourism Single Award for Edexcel:
Mystery shopping is, therefore, classified as an observational marketing research method even though communication is often involved.2012, Charles W. Lamb, Joe F. Hair, Carl McDaniel, Marketing:

plural	mystery shoppings

What does mystery shopping mean?: Mystery shopping means the practice of using mystery shoppers to evaluate a business.
How do you use mystery shopping in a sentence?: Mystery shopping is used by many companies to assess the performance of their staff.
What part of speech is mystery shopping?: Mystery shopping is a noun.
What is the plural of mystery shopping?: The plural of mystery shopping is mystery shoppings.

Adapted from Wiktionary: mystery shopping (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Cite this entry: “mystery shopping.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mystery_shopping. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.