Pockets and handbags stuffed with streams of crumpled receipts could become a thing of the past if an experiment by Tesco takes off.
Britain’s biggest retailer is testing a contactless system that sends proof of purchase to the customer’s smartphone. Tesco is staging the three-month trial at its store in Harlow, Essex.
Customers who take part are given a sticker to tap on a special terminal at the till. This produces a receipt with a barcode they can use to link to an app on their phone. Shoppers can then tap the sticker on the terminal to receive a digital receipt every time they shop. They also receive a truncated paper receipt.
Tesco said using the phone app ensures no email address is involved and that information remains anonymous; the retailer gleans no marketing information, it said. Other retailers such as Argos offer to send receipts to a customer’s email.
Tesco said it believed it was the first UK food retailer to experiment with the system. Any decision to extend it to other stores will depend on what customers in Harlow say about the trial, which was reported in Marketing Week.
Tesco said: “We’re always looking for ways to make the shopping trip a little bit easier for customers. We’re currently trialling a digital receipt service in one of our stores which will allow customers to keep a record of all their receipts in one place.”
Tesco said the system could make it easier for shoppers to keep a record of purchases and that there was a potential environmental benefit from using less paper.
The digital receipt experiment follows Tesco’s launch of its PayQwiq app, which stores credit or debit card and loyalty card details on the customer’s phone so that they can swipe once to pay for shopping.
