Green Retailing Idea - Digital Receipts

SAVE more than 15K trees/year per large retailer

I would like to present an green retailing idea, describing how the retail sector can reduce crucial amount of carbon footprints by setting up infrastructure for distribution of electronic form of transaction receipts, product guarantee and warranty cards against purchases done by customers at the Point of sales tills.

The current approach of disbursing PAPER receipts, warranty and guarantee cards (proof of purchases) for the products purchased at point of sales tills demands heavy production of papers which in turn calls for deforestation.

How the idea supports green computing?
As we all know, trees most importantly are natural sink to pollutants especially carbon dioxide. Today deforestation is done for production of papers for various usages in different industries. The deforestation has resulted decrease in the number of trees that could have otherwise absorbed great deal of carbon dioxide from air thus reducing carbon footprints.

Other Benefits of the idea
In addition to the saving trees, the digital data of transactions can be used in several ways and can be source of different business opportunities.

Most of the insurance claims, good returns and office expenditure claims require reproduction of proof of purchase in a valid format. But many of us fail to save and store the (proof of purchase) in paper form i.e most of the time we lose them. We lose extra money due to unavailability of proof of purchase in a format that is reproducible digitally and that could have been confirmed as from a trusted source.

In most of the cases, we as a consumer fail to save this paper form of proof of purchases for the life of the product, due to which we fail to reproduce it when it is actually needed.

If the transactions would have been available in an electronic form and with a trusted source format, the above claims, returns would be successful with no hassles whatsoever, more than that the process of returns and claims would be automated.

Some calculations:
1 tree makes 16.67 reams of News Print paper - Source: Conservatree.

A branded super store with 1000 branches in a developed country may have on an average 10 tills per store.

With the minimum numbers possible, 13,000 trees/year or even more are cut for producing paper receipts for a single brand of super store in a single country. We have not included the carbon footprints that go in manufacturing these paper receipts.

Furthermore, paper of especially high quality and size is used to produce warranty cards and guarantee cards.

(The figures are illustrative and a detailed calculation to prove the numbers can be made available)

This number will increase exponentially if we include all the basket transactions across all brands of super or non-super stores and point of sales tills where the paper receipts are produced. Additionally, this is similar for all brands of product manufacturers that require producing paper warranty and guarantee cards.

By setting up a the digital receipt solution these numbers can drastically reduce or even vanish. These trees saved, will continue to absorb CO2 from the air thus helping the earth to go green again.

Common Concerns & Questions
Q 1. What if receipts are required by customers with no internet access?
Ans: They still will have an option to ask for paper receipt. The digital
receipts may not completely replace the paper receipts.

Q2. What if the customers ask for paper receipts as well as digital receipts?
Ans : An option of printing receipts on low quality paper should be available at the tills, this quality of paper may not have enough life but satisfy the customer needs to review the items for that day.
Also an SMS service can be made available to extract all the items for a receipt (on a particular day) from the online service to the mobile. This can also be used to review the items purchased at any time.

This solution also builds a trustworthy relationship between the retail-store brand, product brand and the customer as he/she will feel more confident about purchasing goods with this facility since they need not worry about storing the paper formats as a proof of purchase and can easily be reproduced as an electronic document.