A Serving of Digital Receipts – Hold the Spam, Please

The world is going digital, and receipts are no exception.  It’s becoming a hot topic, including national news coverage recently in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and on television.  These new electronic receipts go by many names – e-receipts, email receipts, online receipts, digital receipts, paperless receipts – but the process is usually the same.  Instead of handing you a paper receipt, the store offers to send a receipt by email.  All you have to do is hand over your email address.

Paper receipts are hard to store, can fade, and are all-around annoying.  So you would expect people to flock to digital receipts.  And many have.  But a lot of consumers remain concerned about issues like identity theft, security and merchant “spam”.

Giving a merchant your email address is an interesting proposition.  A lot of savvy shoppers realize that they’re going to get not only a receipt, but likely a lot of ongoing communication from the merchant about deals.   My sister loves getting the deals and offers by email.  But she’s a shopper, and I’m not, so I hate getting all of those emails clogging up my inbox.  Plus I find that they they make it hard to find the actual receipts.  A search on “Apple” or “Gap” of my email account produces hundreds of marketing emails and it takes me a while to find the one or two receipts in there.

My @lemon account has given me the perfect solution to this problem.  Now all of my digital receipts are stored in one place, together with all of my other receipts.  Now the data is easy to find and organized.  Plus Lemon takes care of merchant communications, prioritizing the ones that require my attention (shipment is delayed so what do I want to do?) and keeping the others out of my email inbox (free shipping if a spend $125?).