How Receipt Capture Fills the Gaps in Consumer Buying Data for Retailers

Digital receipts are now a staple of consumer transactions, available through apps on various devices and offering businesses a valuable new data source. Gathering digital records like receipts reveals deep insights into consumer behavior and enables competitive benchmarking.

Why Traditional Research Falls Short

Retailers and e-tailers regularly leverage internal data to gain insights into their customers' buying patterns, but this perspective captures only a segment of overall consumer behaviors. Understanding the full picture requires information about competitor interactions.

Traditional research methods that aim to address this challenge involve asking respondents to state their brand purchases, types, and frequency within an interview setting, which offers directional insights but has drawbacks:

• consumers may not remember all purchases; and
• self-reported data lacks granular details like transaction amounts, dates and product variations.

Enter receipt capture programs — a powerful approach that provides a more detailed and reliable view of consumer behaviors, unlocking insights such as:

• Market Share: Assess how brands and products are performing in the market.
• Consumer Behavior: Monitor buying patterns, frequency, preferences, and commonly paired products.
• Trends: Identify new trends, seasonal purchasing patterns, and sensitivity to pricing and promotions.
• Competitive Intelligence: Uncover insights into competitor strategies, including pricing, promotions, loyalty incentives, and basket composition.

Receipt Capture Programs

Receipt capture programs gather digital receipts in a specific industry to offer ongoing or moment-in-time insights into market trends across areas such as e-commerce, airlines, hospitality, ride-sharing, and streaming services. By offering consumers a small incentive — such as a $25 to $50 gift card or equivalent rewards in international markets — many are willing to provide digital receipts to researchers so they can analyze them to illuminate buying behavior that goes beyond the reach of traditional interviews.

These programs provide data validity and access to dozens of data fields for analysis. After receipt data is collected, organizing it effectively is essential. Optical character recognition (OCR) technology allows for the extraction and structuring of data fields for analysis.

OCR works by converting text images into searchable and editable digital text through the recognition and interpretation of character shapes.

Best Practices

To maximize the benefits of receipt capture programs, it's important to follow a structured approach. Here are key steps and best practices:

• Design with purpose. Start by defining the scope of your program. Identify the brands, data fields, sampling locations, and timeframes that are relevant to your business objectives. This ensures that the program captures the most valuable data for your needs.
• Test and refine. Before full implementation, confirm the efficiency and accuracy of data capture. Address any discrepancies across different receipt types and operating systems. This phase is critical to ensuring the data collected is reliable and useful.
• Engage consumers effectively. Collecting digital receipts in person, with human oversight, ensures the highest level of accuracy. Consumers tend to be willing to submit receipts, and those who decline generally do not differ significantly in behavior from those who participate.
• Implement quality controls. Build an understanding of where the data is coming from and capture the right proof points to ensure the participant has done a comprehensive job of providing information.
• Utilize OCR technology. OCR technology can rapidly process thousands of digital receipts, extracting key data fields with high accuracy. To enhance this process, capture consistently formatted PDFs, when possible, as they're optimal for OCR aggregation.

Looking Ahead

Digital receipts provide a new avenue for gathering competitive insights that are often difficult to obtain. By leveraging systematic collection methods and OCR technology, receipt capture programs can deliver reliable, scalable, and flexible data. In the digital era, every record — from receipts to email confirmations — serves as a potential data source. Receipt capture programs demonstrate how routine digital records can reveal critical insights into consumer behaviors and market patterns. Explore the various types of digital records in your industry and consider developing a program that systematically collects them to generate valuable insights for your business.

Mark Scholz is an insights manager at market research firm KS&R.