How to Become a Personal Shopper and What You Need to Get Started

Simply put, a personal shopper (also known as a personal buyer or private shopper) is someone who’s paid to purchase items for someone else. While personal shopping is commonly associated with clothing and fashion, customers can pay a personal shopping assistants to buy all kinds of items.

Here are examples of typical personal shopper purchases:

• Clothes
• Accessories
• Shoes
• Groceries
• Homeware
• Furniture
• Electronics
• Beauty products
• Pharmacy items
• Prescription medications
• Gifts
• Luxury items

You won’t always get a say in what types of items you shop for. While some professionals specialize in certain products, a personal shopper’s job description ultimately depends on a client’s needs, which vary from one individual to the next.

Job duties and responsibilities

You may be wondering what a personal shopper does apart from buying things. Your day-to-day tasks will largely depend on your specialty, where you work, and your client’s needs, but you can generally expect to have these duties as a personal shopping assistant:

• Consulting with clients by phone, in person, or via video call to assess their budget and needs.
• Sending clients photos or descriptions of products for approval before purchase.
• Visiting or contacting stores to locate requested items.
• Negotiating discounts with suppliers and sellers.
• Providing store or item recommendations, if requested.
• Making approved purchases online or in-store.
• Scheduling and arranging delivery of products.
• Assisting in returning items like clothing, if necessary.
• Employing marketing approaches to find new clients.

In some cases, you may need to perform additional tasks. For instance, if a client needs a custom fashion item, you’ll have to contact the designer to coordinate the request, pricing, timing, and so on.

Who needs personal shoppers?

Customers hire personal shoppers for a variety of reasons. Some people hire personal shoppers because they’re too busy to shop or want more time to themselves. Others simply prefer leaving buying decisions to someone who shops for a living and has professional expertise.

On the other hand, some people hire personal shoppers because they’re unable to leave their homes due to mobility limitations, disabilities, or other personal reasons. For these people, professional shopping services are an absolute necessity rather than a luxury.

Job requirements for personal shoppers vary according to the type of client. Some may require special expertise in a particular type of product. Others just need someone to pick up their weekly groceries.

Regardless, most personal shoppers share a few fundamental skills needed to handle the social, financial, and business aspects of the job.

Required skills

Personal shopping is about more than just checking off items on a list. As a personal shopper, you’re a trusted partner to your clients. The better you do your job, the happier your clients will be and the more money you’ll make.

To be a successful personal shopper, you’ll need several core skills and traits:

• Accuracy
• Punctuality
• Confidence
• Physical endurance
• Organizational skills
• Decision-making skills
• Adaptability
• Customer service skills
• Budget consciousness
• Tech-savviness

Some personal shoppers need a specialized set of skills as well. For instance, fashion shoppers should have a keen fashion sense, industry connections, and maybe even tailoring skills.

If you want to get paid to go shopping for others, there are certain steps you need to take to start your career and set yourself up for success.

1. Educate yourself on personal shopping

Technically, you can begin your personal shopper career with no training at all. Clients aren’t going to be looking at your credentials—instead, they’ll be more concerned with your skills and experience.

However, getting clients is tough when you’ve got no experience, and showing them that you’ve undergone some form of training or education can demonstrate your professionalism and help you stack up against the competition.

If you’re more of a self-educator, try watching YouTube videos on personal shopping, read blogs written by experienced personal shoppers, or take advantage of other free online resources and materials. Alternatively, you could take a professional personal shopping course.

Personal shopping courses

Courses are a simple and surefire way to prepare yourself for a personal shopping career. There are countless courses available online, but here are a couple to get you started:

• Personal Shopper Certificate Course Online: This 6-week, part-time, and self-directed course offered by the International Association of Professions Career College covers topics like coordinating with vendors, choosing an industry, and setting up your business. You’ll get a certification at the end.
• Personal Shopper self-paced course: This course offered by the International Open Academy is for anyone wanting to work as a personal shopper or style assistant at a store. The course will teach you how to become the most helpful personal shopper for your customers. The course doesn’t have an official certificate, but you can request one from the International Council for Online Educational Standards.

Both of these courses cost over $100, but they’ll put you on a fast track toward setting up your personal shopping side hustle the right way and help you avoid beginner mistakes.

The main benefit of coursework is that it’ll equip you with knowledge and skills that you might not be able to get elsewhere. For instance, if you’ve never had to work with a budget before, a course on budgeting or accounting would be good. What’s more, if you get a certification at the end, this will come in handy when it comes time to apply for jobs.

Following industry trends

Regardless of what type of shopping you’re doing and what kind of education you’ve received, keeping up-to-date about what’s going on in different industries is essential for making well-informed purchase decisions for your clients.

Following creators like bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters who regularly report on product news and trends is generally a free or low-cost way to gain a lot of insight.

Here are a few good resources to get you started:

• General retail products: Retail Dive and The Bottom Line.
• Fashion and clothing: Vogue, The Cut, and other top fashion publications.
• Gifts: Trend Bible and Redbubble Life.
• Luxury products: Luxe Digital and Luxury Daily.
• Groceries: Grocery Dive and Progressive Grocer.

2. Choose your target client base

Before you start looking for personal shopping jobs, you need to decide on a specialty. This doesn’t just mean specializing in a particular type of shopping—after all, you may be required to buy a wide range of products, depending on an individual client’s needs. Rather, a key part of specializing as a personal shopper is deciding who your target market will be.

Here are examples of people you could shop for:

• High-profile CEOs and executives
• Celebrities
• People with disabilities
• Families
• Senior citizens
• Doctors
• Lawyers

Finally, decide how much time you’re willing to commit to a personal shopper side hustle. If you have limited availability, then working online through a third-party service and starting with just one client might be the best option for now.

3. Get hands-on experience

It’s hard to get new clients to trust you if you have no experience as a personal shopper. The easiest way to overcome this problem is to practice with friends and family. Keep it simple and focus on managing their shopping for them. This will help improve your punctuality and accuracy.

Next, do a search for personal shoppers or shopping services in your area. See if they’re looking for interns, mentees, or assistants. These professional personal shoppers will show you the ins and outs of the gig while giving you great insight into how to succeed.

Another option is to get a job working as a retail assistant at a local boutique or department store where they offer personal shopping services. This will give you the chance to observe personal shopping from the sidelines while directly supporting the process. It’ll also get you comfortable interacting with people in a retail environment.

4. Build a digital presence

Establishing a digital footprint is essential if you’re starting your own personal shopping business. But even if you’re not planning on working independently right away, marketing yourself like an entrepreneur or business owner will give you a leg up on the competition when applying for personal shopping jobs.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• Resume
• Professional website
• Online portfolio

These assets will make it easier for you to land personal shopping gigs. They’ll also help make you more discoverable to employers or clients looking for new personal shoppers.

To take your digital presence to the next level, consider creating social media accounts for your business on platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. This is especially beneficial if you’re getting into online personal shopping.

Adding a blog to your site is another good idea. This will have the dual benefit of boosting your online visibility and your credibility.

5. Create business cards

Whether you work for private clients or at a shop, you should always have business cards on hand. You never know when you might get talking to someone who’s impressed with your wardrobe or who’s looking for their own private shopper.

Sure, you could just tell them the name of your website and spell it out for them. But if you really want to impress a potential client, hand them a branded business card with all your contact details, including links to your website and social media accounts.

6. Start building relationships within the industry

As a personal shopper, you won’t just be interacting with customers. You’ll also be interacting with retailers, individual sellers, designers, and various businesses.

There are different ways in which you’ll interact with store employees and managers, fashion stylists, and even clothing designers themselves. Building relationships with these key stakeholders early on will make it easier to communicate and collaborate with them later.

You can use professional relationships to your advantage in various ways:

• Negotiate better deals or discounts with stores you shop at regularly.
• Call ahead to stores and ask them to put a hold on popular items for you.
• Be the first to know when new stock arrives for in-demand items.
• Wow clients by reserving preprepared fitting rooms, product consultations, or testing experiences.

Loyalty goes a long way in the personal shopping industry. By building good, mutually beneficial relationships with these vendors, everyone involved will reap the benefits in the long term.

7. Get your first personal shopping gig

One of the most attractive aspects of a personal shopping side gig is its flexibility. You could exclusively work at home, get a fixed schedule with an employer, or set up your own personal shopping business with a hybrid approach.

You have three main options. Which path you choose will determine your responsibilities and where you look for jobs.

Private personal shopping

Perhaps the most popular type of personal shopping to do as a side hustle, private personal shopping or freelance personal shopping involves running your own business. You may juggle multiple clients, and you work directly with them rather than through an employer or third-party service.

If you’re looking to enter the luxury or private shopping spaces, your best bet for finding these gigs is through networking. Go to fashion or other industry events, try cold email outreach, and spread the word through social media and your personal connections.

Online personal shopping

A common way to earn money from personal shopping these days is to offer online personal shopping services, also known as virtual personal shopping or work-from-home personal shopping.

To find online personal shopping jobs, check out third-party freelancing platforms like Guru or Fiverr. The jobs you’ll find on these sites are typically short-term, low-commitment gigs, and you’ll have to sacrifice a cut of your pay. Alternatively, you can try to find your own clients by advertising your services online.

Store-based personal shopping

Unlike freelance personal shoppers, some personal shoppers are employed by retail or department stores. Their main responsibility is to assist customers who are looking for one-on-one assistance.

Store-based personal shoppers usually work in the fashion industry, helping clients purchase clothes and accessories. In addition to being concerned with their customers’ shopping needs, they also have to factor in the store’s sales goals.

If you’ve already gotten your foot in the door by working in sales or customer service for a retailer, start by checking if they have openings for personal shoppers. You can also find vacancies on generic job sites like LinkedIn or Indeed.

Like any other side hustle, personal shopping as a profession is better suited to some people than to others. If you’re an introvert who prefers working alone, then this isn’t the job for you.

On the other hand, if you’re the type of person who thinks of shopping as more fun than work, then a personal shopping side hustle could be a great way to earn extra money doing something you enjoy. We’ll break down the main pros and cons of this side hustle to help you decide whether personal shopping is worth it as a career option.

Benefits of working as a personal shopper

There’s a ton of variety in personal shopping. For starters, you can find yourself doing anything from picking out someone’s groceries to choosing a dress for a celebrity to wear at a special event. Even within a particular specialty, you’ll find that there’s a lot of variety in what you’re asked to buy from day to day.

Personal shopping is also a great side hustle if you enjoy interacting with others. Not only that, you’ll really love this gig if you get a sense of satisfaction from buying the exact thing that someone wanted or needed.

This is also a great choice of side hustle if you like a challenge. From budget and time constraints to dealing with third-party obstacles, you’re going to be juggling a lot of balls all at once.

Drawbacks to working as a personal shopper

The biggest drawback to personal shopping is the inconsistency of the work. Think about the last few years, for instance.

From the pandemic to the recession, one of the first things people cut down on was shopping. So as a side gig, personal shopping is good. However, it could be difficult to maintain as a full-time and long-term profession.

Another drawback of this line of work is the stress. Thanks to today’s super-fast, hyper-convenient, all-knowing technology that powers the world of e-commerce, your customers and clients are going to have high expectations of you.

Depending on which type of personal shopper you become, the work can easily become stressful and draining.

How much do personal shoppers make?

According to Indeed, personal shoppers make an average of $15 per hour, with most earning between $11.19 and $20.40 hourly. 1

However, you could find yourself earning significantly more if you pursue a lucrative niche like luxury personal shopping. As you gain more experience, you’ll also be able to charge more for your services, even upwards of $30 per hour.