Time is an extremely scarce resource for those who are highly committed professionally or work jobs that demand long hours. If you can offer these people a service that can save them time and do so at a reasonable rate, they will gladly pay you for your time and service. One of the fastest growing offerings in the services sector is businesses and people offering personal shopping as a service. You can make a decent living as a personal shopper. That’s a pretty good deal especially if you enjoy shopping.

The demand for personal shoppers is increasing by the day as more and more people become conscious of their image and as they realize that they can subcontract their fashion shopping and decisions to someone who actually gets fashion and style. The internet has also made it easier for people to find and connect with personal shoppers they can trust.

How Personal Shoppers Get Paid

Since you will be running your own business as a personal shopper, how you choose to get paid will be completely up to you. Usually, personal shoppers get paid a percentage of their total purchases or based on an hourly rate.

You can also use the two and set the hourly rate as the minimum payment possible per shopping trip and let the upside run wild by incorporating percentages of purchases made into the fee structure.

You want to be paid for the value you create. As you grow your business, become better skilled in fashion and shopping, and serve clients who are better placed financially, you want a payment structure that allows you to get a fair compensation for the value you bring to the client.

You Are Not Just a Shopper

The value you bring to the client is not just going to the store and collecting a bunch of clothes. The client can hire anybody to do that. Intrinsically, you offer two very important services:

You save them time and energy: you will be taking over the tedious and time consuming exercise of shopping for clothes so that they have the time and energy to do other things that they think give them better returns on time invested.

You are an image consultant: not everyone knows what to wear, what’s good for their body type, and where to find them. As an image consultant, you will be choosing the best fashion pieces for your client and helping them develop and maintain a great personal style.

Getting the Job Done

As is the case in any field, you have to know your craft to have any chance of competing effectively. You must have some knowledge of fashion and how to put various fashion pieces together. If you’ve worked in fashion or clothing retail, you will have a great head start.

You should also know the fashion stores where you can find what you want. After some time, you will form a relationship with these stores so that you can score discounts.

Getting clients is not complicated at all. Before you start reaching out to prospective clients, you should create a simple professional website to establish some credibility. Ideally, the website should be a blog. A blog will allow you to write about fashion a lot and so attract readers who you can then turn into clients.

Social media is also a great tool to attract clients. If you dress well yourself, you can post photos on your Instagram page and make it clear that you also do personal shopping. You can promote your Instagram page using paid ads.

Further, you can make business cards and have a store attendant you know dish them out to customers who shop at the store. If you have different business cards for every store you have an attendant dish out business cards and also use different email addresses, you will know who referred who to you and reward them appropriately based on the referral fees you agree on.