Technology
Why Can’t We Have Better Receipts?
A CSV receipt would be simple to implement and would be so helpful
Most receipts are as close to useless as I can imagine. No standards exist for how they show you what you bought. Often the descriptions are cryptic and incomplete. There must be a better way.
There is, but nobody I know of offers it.
I would be ecstatic if every store could give me a csv file (comma separated value, can be imported to spreadsheets) of what I bought, the UPC or ISBN or whatever fully identifies it, when I bought it and its price. Possibly shipment and tracking data could be added for some sales. Serial numbers when needed.
We’d have to have some standards body specify what fields should be included, what they should be called, how they should be formatted and so on. There would also have to be some pressure on sellers to provide this data.
This would be optional for you, of course. If the store has your email, they could whip this out to you with almost no extra effort at all as they need every bit of this for their own use. If you don’t care about this, you could have your jumbled old paper receipt.
A seller could, with slightly more effort and expense, provide a web portal where you could access and download this data. I suspect some sellers already have a history of past purchases (Amazon certainly does), so you might be able to go back to before the formatted data was available to you.
If we had that, we could import it into our own spreadsheets. That would let us easily compare prices, check warranties, know how often we buy expendables and more.
There would be clever apps that could read that data and give you information I haven’t even thought of. Stores might have their own apps that could tell you if something you want today is in the store and where it is on the shelf. Who knows what might come from this?
How do we get this?
We have to ask for it. Ask for it, promote it, beg for it. Every time I fill out a survey about customer satisfaction, I mention this idea. If I chat with a store manager, I try to work it in. You could do that.
You could also write an article about it. Please, steal my idea. You don’t even need to mention me; I want the data, not the credit. My little light is barely visible on the Internet, yours may be much brighter. Even if it is not, every mention adds to the weight of desire.
What do you think? Would you want this? Do you want it enough to do something about it? I certainly hope so!
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