Alexander Kayser, CEO “It all started with our own experience as shoppers: walking into an Apple store in 2008, and receiving a receipt via email for a shiny new iPhone had a real and lasting impact. In addition we were all puzzled why, in a seemingly connected world, expenses were still processed through old-fashioned, fallible, paper-based systems that included peculiar and inefficient processes such as typing up expense receipts, stapling them together, scanning in the printed expense form and faxing it to some remote finance department." recalls Alexander Kayser, CEO, on the impetus for him and his co-founders, Scott Fletcher and Richard Druce, to set up yReceipts.
This innovative company enables retailers from around the world to issue versatile and customizable digital receipts in their brick-and-mortar stores - connecting the physical and digital worlds. yReceipts’ pioneering technology enable companies to establish a new and non-incentivized way to identify in-store customers and their purchases, while connecting both to their wider data ecosystems.
"The firm’s innovative technology is system agnostic, globally deployable, and enables companies around the globe to stream data of in-store transactions worth billions of dollars"
Well-known high street brands use the yReceipts service in thousands of stores across 4 continents to track, collect and stream in-store transactions worth billions of US-Dollars annually. “Retailers create digital touch points with in-store shoppers”, stresses Kayser. “It enables our customers to create real-time connections into their CRM, Marketing, Ratings & Review or other platforms.”
yReceipts' solution comes in the form of a light-touch software app which does not require any additional IT development, hardware or even integration with the retailer’s existing Electronic Point Of Sale (EPOS) system. It creates an extremely fast and future-proof, yet non-invasive way to stream in-store data to where it is needed.
yReceipts acts as a B2B technology provider, meaning retailers do not have to sign up to a 3rd party branded network and can stay in full control of their brand and data.
“We are incredibly proud of our powerful proprietary algorithms that sit at the very core of our system-agnostic technology. We are not dependent on what a transaction looks like, which region or retail IT system it occurs on, and we don’t mandate how shoppers are identified.” says, Richard Druce, CTO of yReceipts.
Measuring the Impact of Digital Ad Spend on In-Store Sales
Already today, the majority of brick-and-mortar purchases are influenced by digital content and adverts. Arguably a fundamental shift in the advertising industry is just around the corner - in Silicon Valley it is dubbed the ‘Trillion Dollar Opportunity’: measuring the in-store sales impact and influence of digital ads published on ad platforms like Google, Facebook, Criteo and others.
yReceipts enables retailers and their partners to identify in-store customers, which products they buy, and how digital ad spend influences in-stores sales
“To measure the offline impact you need to run the ad and then, in-store 1) identify the shopper 2) link them to their purchase and 3) stream the data back into the ad platform where it can be attributed back to the ad.” says Kayser. “We deliver a unified and system-agnostic solution to handle the in-store part of that journey to complete the offline conversion loop.”.
The firm connects to all major advertising platforms with this solution and enables its clients to surface how their digital ad spend and content influences offline revenues. “We helped uncover amazing insight with this solution” says Kayser proudly. There are endless examples: one client has been able to attribute more than a quarter of their revenue (including offline revenue) to one digital advertising platform; another achieved 25% net new customer acquisition and saw north of 700% Return On Ad Spend.
The Non-Loyalty Program Approach and GDPR
yReceipts has two key ingredients to ‘close the loop’ – first is a method to find out ‘who buys what in the real world’ and second is ‘independence of systems.’ “These two came organically out of our original digital receipt solution. By default, a digital receipt links a customer to a transaction - just like a loyalty program. The key differences being the purchase is not incentivized, the data quality is extremely high, and the program is much more cost efficient” states Kayser. He also highlights that digital receipts are not only an alternative to a loyalty program, but can also co-exist to help identify shoppers that are not members, thus still increasing overall customer visibility.
yReceipts is particularly significant for non-grocery retailers, including classic high-street retail brands, fashion, footwear or electronic brands. Unlike supermarkets, these types of retailers do not typically fit well with traditional loyalty programs as purchases are less frequent but of higher value. Digital receipts can bridge the inevitable data-gap that these retailers encounter. They make it easier for companies to identify brick-and-mortar customers, and collect real-time in-store shopper and transactional data.
Happily, due to yReceipts’ founders’ backgrounds in building large-scale data security environments and handling customer data, their system has been designed from the ground up in a way that make their solutions fully GDPR compliant and secure.
CPG Data
yReceipts' unique and groundbreaking technology approach benefits not only retail brands who need to identify their in-store customers, but also companies that are handling access to, and distribution of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) data who establish access to the data from across different EPOS environments.
Clientele Interaction
Since 2009 yReceipts has assisted companies in need to discover who buys what in the real world - opening up a wealth of hitherto untapped data.
Two of the many yReceipts customer success stories are a global fashion group and a leading global foreign exchange bureau.
The leading global foreign exchange bureau serves millions of customers in branches across a number of continents. They are running yReceipts’ technology across all countries and establish a real-time global understanding of who their customers are. Their customer database increased by several thousand percent in the first year.
The global fashion group successfully engaged yReceipts and rolled out their technology across 17 countries and 3 brands in only 4 weeks.
The Path Ahead
Designed to capture every single transaction in a brick-and-mortar store, yReceipts is also involved in groundbreaking new projects in related industries. Some of the objectives are to tap previously unseen data and enable innovative ways to seamlessly connect a shopper with their transaction in a retail store. “We are very excited about the future,” says Kayser. “Being part of the forefront of enabling offline retail data access, brings us to places and connects us with companies that are cutting edge. We are excited about the projects that we are involved in and the road map ahead of us. We have certainly come a long way since we issued the first digital receipt for our first customer in Shoreditch, London.”
