Retail TouchPoints: Is the Retail World Ready for Digital Receipts?
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Retail TouchPoints website.
During the checkout process today, consumers often leave the store with a paper receipt longer than their arm. Not only does this process fly in the face of the green movement, it is also inconvenient for consumers to store and manage reams of paper from different merchants.
Apple and a few other retailers have started to shorten the paper trail by encouraging consumers to have a PDF of their receipt emailed to them. However, the entrance of software giant Intuit into the digital receipt space could usher in a more dramatic shift to paperless checkouts. During this past holiday season, Intuit launched a pilot program in the Scottsdale, AZ market to test the waters for the launch of QuickReceipts.
The pilot, which is scheduled to run through the end of February 2010, is working with leading retailers including Best Buy, Cost Plus, World Market, Dillard's, Smart & Final and Peek...Aren't You Curious. Tapping into the product expertise and installed customer base from such products as TurboTax, Quicken and QuickBooks, QuickReceipts is designed as a hub to provide consumers online access to their electronic receipts from participating retailers via MyQuickReceipts.com. Based on the success of the pilot program in Arizona with major retailers, Intuit is planning for a national rollout with additional retailer participants.
Other leading solution providers in the digital receipt space are already planning to partner with Intuit's rollout. afterBOT announced the commercial availability of QuickReceipts Connect at the NRF show earlier this month, a solution designed to provide the retailers with fast, efficient integration to the QuickReceipts centralized digital receipt repository.
"AfterBOT's digital receipt expertise gives retailers more advanced ways to serve and support their customers, increase loyalty and reduce shopping stress," said Jim Nadler, VP of marketing, afterBOT. "We designed QuickReceipts Connect to be a flexible and scalable application that works easily with retailers' existing systems or with our TransAccess applications."
With afterBOT's solution, retailers can implement QuickReceipts Connect, which is PCI compliant, and link to the QuickReceipts repository. afterBOT's team uses the NRF industry standard ARTS Digital Receipt XML (DRXML) format to enable QuickReceipts Connect to be fully functional quickly and enable participation in the next phase of the project.
AfterBOT also offers services to integrate, maintain and manage the connection, allowing retailers to store data within their firewall and move data to QuickReceipts.
Discussion Questions: Is the time right for digital receipts? What are the pros and cons of digital versus paper receipts for consumers and retailers?