Turn purchases into consumer insights.
Download our guide for our framework to find the best
receipt capture technology solution for your organization.
For many consumers, receipts are an afterthought. Subsequent to paying for a purchase at a physical retail store, the receipt will either get crumbled into a wallet or purse for an undetermined period of time, or simply disposed of as trash.
Some consumers, however, inspect their receipt immediately to ensure that proper discounts or promotions (e.g., buy one, get one free) were applied, or to see if they qualified for any additional savings at checkout. These savvy shoppers understand the value of a receipt and how much information — and potential rewards — can be gleaned from it.
Receipts provide customers with proof-of-purchase, but they provide brands, retailers and market research firms with much more.
However, not all OCR solutions are created equal.
Receipts, whether physical or digital, are complex, diverse documents that vary in format and image quality. There is no global receipt standard across retailers or geographies that states what information must be included on a receipt, in what order, and in what format (i.e., product codes or abbreviations).
When you think about the number of retailers around the globe, as well as the sheer number of products that stores contain, the ability to automatically and accurately know which exact items were purchased — and where — begins to feel overwhelming. Roughly half of the receipts in the US have product numbers on them, which are generally derivations of a UPC or “Universal Product Code.” (For more on product codes, check out this blog.)
Microblink goes beyond receipt OCR and character recognition, utilizing what we call “product intelligence” to deliver UPC-level purchase data at scale. While OCR converts images to text, Microblink takes it a step further, translating confusing descriptions and codes into fully descriptive products.
Our clients own the receipts and the end-user data they collect through them. Our tech is embedded in these apps in the form of mobile SDKs for iOS & Android.
For organizations looking to unlock first-party purchase data at scale — whether it’s to validate purchases and promotions, support market research, or inform media & advertising strategies — Microblink utilizes a variety of technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), to automate this process.
Market research firms and large retailers with their own shopper panels, who have mobile apps offering incentives for consumers uploading their receipts, also use our technology to power their applications. In this instance, data collection processes that used to be manual (and extremely cumbersome and error-prone as a result) are streamlined, with more complete, accurate data — at a lower cost and in a more efficient manner. Sophisticated software, like that offered by Microblink, can enable better-than-human levels of accuracy while processing both in-store retail receipts and online (i.e., e-Commerce) transactions.
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