The slow road to digital receipts
I used to have lot more hope for digital receipts than I have now, read on to find out why. I keep thinking about them every once in a while. I see people (yeah even Fred Wilson) getting excited about them when they see Apple has implemented it in their stores. This even came up as an idea in the comments for Fred Wilson's post about Internet is alive and well.
However, today I felt the 'Hurry' to dig deeper to find some history here, I cannot be the first guy to be thinking about implementing this right. Right, in fact the first mention (at least what I found on google) of it was in 1999
In Jan 2000 Carol Sliwa of ComputerWorld predicted that within 18 months that digital receipts would take off:
"Within a year to 18 months, both online and in-store shoppers may be able to opt for digital receipts.Based on the XML content-tagging language, the receipts can be viewed through browsers under a standard announced last week and backed by Visa International Inc., Office Depot Inc. and several high-tech vendors led by NCR Corp."
The supposed standard was accepted by the key retail org
"The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) of the National Retail Federation formally accepted a proposed XML-based standard for delivering receipts over the Internet."
Here is the kicker, in April 2000, NCR (yes NCR, the POS god) started pushing for digital receipts.
"NCR Corp. has orchestrated the creation of a digital receipt standard backed by such companies as America Online, Microsoft, Office Depot, ValiCert, RCS and Hewlett-Packard's VeriFone division, collectively known as the Digital Receipt Alliance."
"ARTS, the New York-based Association for Retail Technology Standards of the National Retail Federation, has formally accepted the proposed XML-based standard."
In 2002 Carol Sliwa reported the successful implementation of digital receipts by Smart & Final.
"Smart & Final Stores Corp.'s IT department last night went live with the final systems in a trailblazing one-year project to bring digital receipts to its small-business customers."
In 2003 ARTS and AfterBOT Announce Collaboration on Digital Receipt Technology
"to create an atomic-level marketing database which provides secure, unique views of the data across the retailer`s extended enterprise, enabling access both internally and externally to their employees, suppliers and consumers."
In 2007 alletronic a startup started to attempt in solving this. Standard solution, install their software on the POS systems, customers sign up on their website with the credit cards, a matching cards transactions are published to alletronic. When I talked to them earlier in this year they told me they are focussing on Universities, stadiums etc and not yet targeting retail chains.
Another startup digitalreceipts around the same timeframe took little different approach using a digital receipt card, sort of a club card again the POS systems need software installed to process this. The data gets stored and accessible to the consumers at http://myreceipts.com/MyReceipts/
Compete.com shows very bleak website stats for these startups.
As recent as July 2009 Bradley Ericson , a student at Drexel, started 3SecondReceipts Seems like he got a pretty good shoutout from his school and possibly some implementations with Sodexo.
What bugs me the most is why could not NCR achieve this? Why could not so many big company's involved in the early vision of digital receipts could not push this to reality? Was it the fact that this retail data is so key to the retail chains marketing departments and to their analytics department that they would not want to share this and hence not allow that data to go out of their systems? Target has all the customer receipts centrally stored but would they allow digitalreceipts.com or alletronic.com get access to that data? May be Apple's approach of simply emailing the receipt to the end customer is the only viable alternative? Why are the solutions/success scattered with the likes of Apple, Target, Smart & Final?
Chadwick Matlin in his article "Death to receipts" sums up best the state of digital receipts.
"So I begrudgingly and all-too-appropriately wave my white flag. You win, receipts. You're too entrenched for us to force out in a grassroots campaign. It's up to big business to get rid of you – the credit card companies are our only hope. And for obvious reasons, that means there isn't much hope at all. "
I do not see a fast path here, it seems like a slow road to digital receipts. I sure hope I am wrong and we start seeing much faster progress in this area.
