Always check receipt as soon as you can. Very disappointing how often I’m overcharged by large businesses and small. For this reason a receipt in the hand is useful so it will be checked quite soon and the issue dealt with, but a digital copy is very convenient as it’s a great way to store receipts in case a warranty needs to be used.
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Yes. A digital receipt may or may not be available immediately.
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Welcome to the community @melinch6
Agree, especially for any major purchase to ensure the details have been recorded correctly. Experience is basic errors with spelling or address do occur. Usually not a concern, however we’ve also had one of the G Guys click the wrong customer ID on the screen. All other purchase details being correct!
P.S.
Agree digital receipts may be convenient for some. Not so depending on the store location. Our big name chain local chemist shop is a mobile dead zone. For digital prescriptions one needs to bring up the QR codes before approaching and when far down the road. Similar for reception in all the neighbouring shops. Although full service Telstra customers seem to be better covered. Regional mobile blues. 
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Refer the suggestion above that another way of doing electronic receipts is that a QR code comes up on the cash register screen and you scan it on your phone and the QR code is the receipt, now safely loaded onto your phone.
That avoids any need for a working mobile service at the location of the store, avoids the need for any radio frequency communication at all, and gives you better privacy than having to sacrifice your mobile number or your email address etc.
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It may within the data capacity of a QR code be one solution. What’s in it for the retailer when compared with the current trend of collecting customers mobile or email details?
Even the latest version of QR coding has nowhere near the information content (less than 2k bytes) to be the actual receipt. That’s what the original IBM PC had over 40 years ago.
Receipts I typically see have lots of graphics and fonts and promotional material that would never fit into a QR image.
What would be in a QR would be a link to where you can download your receipt. So you need to connect to the Web anyway to get your receipt. Assuming you remember to do so at some later time when Network connection is available.
And the last thing I want to be inflicted with is being stuck behind customers trying to take their happy snaps of codes with their mobile phones when it takes a second or two to print out a receipt.
I well remember the long time most people took trying to check in scanning those codes during the Covid Gov requirements that thankfully ended a year ago.
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A fair question. Two answers:
- If customers push back about handing over information then whatever the benefit of electronic receipts to the retailer (which benefits are obvious) those benefits can only be achieved by seeking alternative approaches that are acceptable to customers.
- Avoid prosecution if there were to be rulings and/or additional legislation that says that such data is collected unnecessarily and unreasonably. (This is more likely to start in the EU, where they actually care about this stuff, and then flow here via multinationals who can’t be bothered having one set of rules for the EU and another set of rules for Australia, and with standards having been set elsewhere those standards can be adopted by local retailers.)
If you suggest that this might be optimistic then I pre-emptively agree with you. 
I think you would be surprised. I spent some time looking into the EU vaccination certificate (QR code). The encoded value has just 600-odd bytes, and that includes a digital signature (to ensure that forgery or alteration or even repudiation is not possible - which should also be used for an electronic receipt). Once decoded, it becomes about 5 KB. So, yes, there is an aspect of compression there - and there is sensible encoding that maximises the available ‘space’ - all standards(!) based, the design work already done (other than adapting the data elements to a different application).
Of course that’s true but almost none of that is relevant to a receipt per se i.e. proof of purchase.
Thought experiment: What would be the minimum legitimate information needed on a receipt? Write it up as (e.g.) JSON, compress it (e.g. using the compression that underlies the various zip formats) … and see what the resulting length is.
Yes, a QR code has limits - but you don’t know until you try.
That is certainly viable. It is discussed above as one possible option. There are (at least) two disadvantages.
- You may not be able to get the receipt at the time of purchase and hence be unable to verify the accuracy of the receipt at the time of purchase (and also be unable to prove purchase if challenged by store security).
- It has some of the privacy problems - since accessing a web site may itself attempt to collect information about you (and then associate it with the receipt and then potentially associate it with PII).
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Wrapping up many comments and concerns, Woolie Rewards app does it all from making a queue take longer to getting information to making checkout and using gift cards easy.
When it works the rewards app scans a QR on the checkout terminal preferably before the checkout is completed, adds the rewards card and when time to pay uses any gift cards registered in the app and then credit/debit card(s) in order. When it fails (about 1 of 10 times at a checkout) the checker has to park the transaction and take it to the service desk where it always has worked to date. The electronic receipts appear almost instantaneously save once where the system fell into a heap of bits and it required the store to reboot the rewards payment system; 15 minutes chatting to the friendly staff while we all watched it reboot.
Some outcomes:
- The ‘happy’ customers behind get delayed for about 3 to 5 minutes while the checker retries a failure only to have it repeatedly fail and has to park and take the transaction to the service desk.
- When it works (most of the time) the ‘delay’ is similar to processing a credit card and quicker if using a gift+credit card.
- Woolies gets a treasure trove of marketing information.
- The electronic receipt is available for long enough so there is no need to save paper ones; I gave up paper at Woolies months ago and have not looked back (YMMV).
- The ease of using gift cards+credit cards has resulted in my buying Woolies discounted eWish cards whereby prior to the rewards payment system it was more hassle than I was willing to bear. A win for Woolies, a small win for me.
I suspect other businesses might be looking to emulate it.
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Would be a complete non-starter for me. That is even more intrusive and abusive, potentially.
- You ran blackbox code on your phone that may be doing absolutely anything. A treasure trove of marketing information may be only the tip of the iceberg. If you give informed consent to surrendering all that marketing information, that’s 100% fine for you but can you audit what is actually occurring?
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What on a phone is not really a blackbox. It is all based on trust as we can each make our decisions eyes wide open. Many of us, such as ourselves, with more insight than others.
I am increasingly succumbing to being served for the price of surrendering information and presented Woolies app only as a datapoint.
A printed receipt addresses both of your last two points.
For those who embrace the world of everything on their smart phone, then the printed receipt could have a QR code version that could be scanned at the SPE’s ( Smart Phone Enthusiast) convenience. And not hold up others.
A QR code version with enough information to contain a detailed receipt will need a high resolution customer facing screen. I don’t see many of them in retailers. Not even the big supermarkets.
And the information able to be printed out on a receipt is limited only by the length of the roll of paper in the printer.
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I don’t doubt some of the superior points about a printed receipt. I am more than happy to keep going with printed receipts. I would prefer a printed receipt to any abusive alternative.
However I am anticipating that more and more retailers will get onto this - see the benefits to them in offering electronic receipts and make it harder and harder to get a printed receipt. So in that case I would like the least abusive option for the consumer.
Again, you don’t know until you try.
(At the very least, the self-service checkouts definitely already have a customer-facing screen i.e. readily accessible to the customer’s smartphone. So the two reductions in the retailer’s costs could go hand-in-hand.)
As an example, the aforementioned vaccination certificate QR code is 225 pixels x 200 pixels, displays on my screen at about 4 cm x 4 cm, and my screen is a fairly mature, nothing special, regular monitor - and, holding my smartphone’s camera up to the screen, the QR code is recognised immediately by my smartphone, which even labels it correctly as a vaccination certificate (without clicking on it on the smartphone).
I have frequently held a smartphone camera up to the screen for the purposes of reading a QR code. This is a typical way of bootstrapping 2FA i.e. the QR code contains the shared secret that will be used by phone and web site alike to generate a stream of one-time passwords. So I don’t think my success in scanning QR codes off the screen is unusual.
What would be the changeover cost to ditch a cash register printer as it dies, or pro-actively, and replace with a small customer-facing screen? Does the business case stack up? Who knows?
You wonder even whether a store that was rolling out Electronic Shelf Labels (and would potentially need hundreds of them just for the shelving) could order some extra to cover each checkout. The unit cost is not high. However there would be some trade-offs in that approach as ESLs were not specifically designed for the purpose here.
But then the printer roll always seems to run out for the customer who is right before me - thus holding me up anyway.
That would be a small QR image holding a small amount of text. Care to say what QR version that would be interpreted as?
Holding 600-odd printable ASCII characters being characters from the code points of Base-45 (uppercase alphabetics, the digits, and 9 specifically chosen punctuation characters). This is getting a bit beyond my level of knowledge but there’s a comment from somewhere (EU documentation?) that refers to Base-45 being chosen for (near) optimal representation within the chosen QR code encoding.
However as noted above, because the actual data is compressed before encoding in Base-45 and then conversion to a QR code, the length of the actual data is substantially greater than 600-odd bytes, being about 5 KB of actual data.
I was hoping that the open source program I am using to decode QR codes would, with sufficient verbosity level, tell me that but it does not. So I don’t know the module configuration / QR version.
Too much techo detail. Let’s get back to the simple gist of the topic.
My experience is that every place I ever shop will give a receipt. Printed. And that includes the smallest corner shop that has any ability to handle Eftpos.
Experiences can vary. I’m familiar with several exceptions. One a local Not for Profit landcare organisations. Payment accepted by cash or CC etc. Digital receipt the norm, and a hand written if requested. A second a small urban barber in Brisbane which opened using Square as their payment facilitator. No printing facility. The local plumber we use has MYOB and relies on the mobile phone to arrange bookings, issue invoices, and send receipts. Payment requested by EFT. In our instance after the work had been completed.
Agree it’s not common unless one uses smaller businesses, and perhaps also lives away from a major urban centre.
Well yes. Same with me. Services such as gardening or trades visits, may well be handled entirely online.
But, the topic is about retailers, and how they handle receipts that they are required to provide on request.
Over time discussion topics can broaden, introduce related content and if needed split off.
It offers a further perspective on the issues that may arise vs acceptance of digital receipting. Are the shared concerns and issues similar?
Several here send out regular reminders for annual services, IE a sound basis with regular needs. Others are simply seeking opportunity to sell an added service that is not of interest. Hence collecting and tracking based on prior custom and data collection. It’s targeted advertising and promotion reliant on holding collected personal contact details often delivered through the invoice/billing process. Note that a tax invoice is the primary requirement to meet ATO requirements.
P.S.
Updated topic heading to reflect the broader discussion of digital receipts, concerns, issues and how different retailers/businesses are proceeding.
Indeedy. But this is a can of worms.
- If registered for GST then it must be a tax invoice and must include certain information as mandated by the ATO. Details omitted for the purposes of keeping it high level.
- If not registered for GST then that fact must conversely be expressed (but you are then exempt from ATO requirements).
Regardless though the receipt is serving multiple masters, since, as well as serving the government, it must be proof-of-purchase for the consumer (store security, returns, …) and it needs to be able to be linked back to the transaction on the store’s system. It is desirable for the consumer that it show payment method.
And across all that it must be secure against fraudulent or accidental alteration, forgery (fabrication), etc.
