Why a Receipt Aggregator’s Zero Knowledge of Receipt Contents Is A Pre-Requisite of Receipt…

Why a Receipt Aggregator’s Zero Knowledge of Receipt Contents Is A Pre-Requisite of Receipt Aggregation

Read on to see why a retailer has absolutely no interest whatsoever in sharing itemized sales data in return for digital receipts.

At Xiippy.ai, we are constantly told “this is amazing that you have managed to provide the highest level of privacy for end consumers via your platform”. However, what is normally missed at the first glance is the fact that the bigger driver to employ end-to-end encryption to achieve zero knowledge of receipt contents was actually retailers’ needs of not sharing itemized sales data with 3rd parties, which has been cited as the biggest barrier against receipt aggregation.

Xiippy.ai owns multiple patents in cryptography and zero-knowledge marketing; a paradigm we invented fundamentally whereby we remain unaware of the data that is used to customize deals and offers available to individuals based on their private purchase history.

Here, we drill down into the reasons why retailers do not like to share their itemized sales data, and, why Xiippy is the ONLY logical way forward to get rid of paper receipts without retailers having to share their sales data with 3rd parties, or without customers having to deal with tens of apps or having to lose privacy.

Business-In-Confidence Classification

Basically and fundamentally, a business’ itemized sales data is normally considered of protected business-in-confidence classification. This for franchise retail businesses is even of higher level of sensitivity to the extent that the disclosure of sales information is subject to non-disclosure agreements and the assurance that such information is not shared with any parties since it can and may affect the value of the entire franchise business network and the desirability of owning franchises for prospective new franchisees.

Until this perspective is taken into account and this need is served, the problem does not take a clear form. A business should have a 100% trust level with a 3rd party to share itemize sales data with that party; an ask simply “too big”, even for the government and tax offices, let alone private entities.

The Value of Itemized Sales Data

Another dimension to consider is that larger retail networks usually sell polished versions of their sales reports to market research entities which intensifies the vibe of ‘property’ and ‘ownership’ and ‘revenue generation’. Such market research firms also sell their accumulative reports. This in fact is a business itself. Now imagine a private entity shows up with the offering that ‘share with us all your itemized sales data so that we transfer receipts to your customers, which by the way, you can do yourself and in return, we charge you as well, since we are firstly, super trustable, and secondly, saving the environment’.

It must be obvious that such an offering can hardly get a positive response from major retailers.

Sharing itemized sales data with a party by a retailer simply feels like that the retailer is handing over a huge privilege to the recipient. In other instances, the retailer would charge the recipients for such data. Hence, the idea of being charged on top of the whole deal feels simply “absurd” for the retailer.

Overall, the idea of sharing itemized sales data to digitize receipts in an aggregated form suffers from the classic issue of “non-necessity” or “low return for a big ask”.

Read on to see how Xiippy is the ONLY provider that has solved this big issue.

Competitors’ Eggs in One Basket

Now, imagine a large retail network did decide to share their itemized sales data with a receipt aggregator. What if the retailer had a competitor who was doing the very same thing? In that case, the receipt aggregator would be placed in a critical position in terms of being disclosed with information that in normal circumstances would change the balance between the competitors’ competition. Let’s assume that there are all types of legal non-disclosure agreements and privacy policies and data usage policies in place too. What if the receipt aggregator’s data is breached? In such a case, do non-disclosure agreements or policies do anything?

All in all, a large retailer with competitors does not want to even think of such an exposure to share sales data to a party that can unintentionally cause the competition to be tampered with, exposing the strength and weakness areas of a business’ sales.

Then What?

Based on the reasons discussed above, unless all businesses legislatively end up having to disclose their itemized sales data to an entity (e.g. the government itself), there are only two possibilities going ahead:

a. Status quo to continue

In this possibility, since retailers do not want to share sales data with 3rd parties, they try to digitize receipts themselves as they go by accepting huge upfront investment and change management. However, they will need to tackle the issues of having to ask customers for personal details, or fruitlessly trying to encourage people to join their loyalty programs to get a small percentage of their customers (40% at most) on board, and for consumers to have to deal with tens of loyalty cards and yet, not be able to find their receipts in one location.

b. Zero-knowledge receipt aggregation

In this possibility, which has been already realized by Xiippy’s patented platform, the aggregator remains unaware of receipt contents, hence no sales or purchase data is shared with Xiippy, whilst trend analysis and eligibility detection for loyalty offers remains possible (hence the patent).

This is the only way forward that ticks all the check marks.

It should be now obvious why Xiippy is the only logical choice to tackle the problems of customer identification, receipt digitization, loyalty management and in-store payments, unlike competitors and retailers’ own solutions.