Receipt Vault

Out with paper receipts, in with Receipt Vault

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The Problem

In the United States alone, the production of paper receipts results in the consumption of 12.4 million trees and 13 billion gallons of water, as well as the generation of 1.5 billion pounds of waste and emittance of 4 billion pounds of CO2, every single year Source 1, Source 2. Additionally, the overwhelming majority of printed receipts are coated in either Bisphenol-A (BPA) or its chemical cousin Bisphenol-S (BPS) Source. These chemicals are easily absorbed into our skin, and have been shown to be hazardous to our reproductive systems, and are also linked with obesity and attention disorders. Additionally, a major pain point for shoppers is keeping track of their many receipts, and the unfortunate dilemma of trying to make a return

The Solution (Almost)

E-Receipts are becoming more and more prevalent. As of 2022, 34% of merchants offer a digital receipt option, and about 95% plan on offering their customers an electronic receipt in the future Source. The most common form of delivery of e-receipts is by email. For customers that have several different email inboxes, or that prefer not to have their receipts mixed in with personal emails, e-receipts can become an unintentional pain point.

Our Solution

Receipt Vault is an app that provides a dedicated inbox for all of your digital receipts. When a user registers an account, an email is generated on our domain, which the user can then provide when checking out at a store. All receipts sent to that email are immediately displayed in the Receipt Vault app. Users can then reference those receipts later for a variety of reasons, such as returns/refunds, business trip reimbursements, general expenditure tracking, etc. Our advanced search functionality allows users to find receipts for particular items when they've forgotten where/when they purchases them, as well as finding old purchases from particular days in the past. Our local stores section allows the user to provide their current location, and then lists nearby stores that match certain criteria, such as being sustainable or vegan.

Current Alternatives

There are several other apps available to shoppers at the moment that target a similar goal as us. A common flaw that they unanimously face is their requirement for a picture of the receipt to be uploaded, from which they pull the purchase data that they store. With this model, you still have the paper receipt that we're aiming to move away from in the first place. Additionally, that amount of work is a pain point for the user. Receipt Vault aims at streamlining the entire process; the user shops, provides their vault email at checkout, and that's it.

Future Outlook

Environmental Impact: With the current version of Receipt Vault, we suggest sustainable retailers in our "Local Stores" page. Tracking purchases at sustainable stores for the user, and presenting it to them on the "Impact" page is definitely high up on our to-do list. Placing an insignia, like a tree, on store tiles in our Grouped Receipts view, to signify sustainable stores is an additional focus of these plans.

Further Customer Benefit: Many stores provide coupons with their receipts, and returning customers that have an interest in saving money typically keep track of these. We plan on adding a functionality that pulls these coupons from delivered digital receipts, and displays them in their own tab in Receipt Vault.

Business Monetization: As more and more retailers turn to digital receipts, an app as useful of Receipt Vault will expect to see a large userbase. Selling advertisement space at the top of our "Local Stores" page, as displayed in the mockup, will be a major channel for app monetization.

Implementation

One of the best aspects of this app, from a developer's perspective, is that it's all an extremely straightforward implementation. The whole idea of the app is immediately attainable, and we plan on building the codebase over the Summer. Starting at registration, a dedicated address on our domain catch-all is assigned to the user, from their, all emails that come through are parsed, confirmed as valid receipts, and propagated into our database, stored with a reference to the user's account id. Local stores can be easily pulled from the Google Maps API, and the information displayed for them is all publicly available.

We're incredibly excited about what's to come for Receipt Vault :)

Thank you for having us, Cole and Nikhil

Built With

  • figma
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