HN Explorer

Ask HN: What advice would you give our startup?

9 points by contactdick ↗ HN
I'm a long time reader but this is my first post.<p>Myself and a few friends have started a company (yReceipts) that allows physical store fronts to email receipts to customers from their till. The obvious benefits being less paper and email receipts are easier to find / retrieve / manage than paper ones!<p>Our business model is shops pay us (a small monthly fee) to install the service in their till and then benefit through increased customer satisfaction and the chance to market or get customer feedback (e.g. two faces happy / sad to rate the service) on ONLY the emails that contain receipts - we don't give out shoppers email address or send spam (that would suck!!!)<p>Our current situation is a few paying customers, a few trialling and advanced talks with many more.<p>Our technology is working ok, we have more work than we can deliver as we are short on engineering.<p>We've had one round of investment and are looking at a second so we can increase our engineering capabilities.<p>I'd love to get a reality check of what smart tech savvy people think of the idea just to ground ourselves because it's easy to get caught up in the day to day.<p>Cheers for reading,<p>Richard

8 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 22.6 ms ] thread
Kliment
Wait, does that mean the shop gets my email address? I wouldn't want that. If not, then you have a chicken/egg problem as both the customers and the shops have to register to get the benefit. You could use a discount coupon as an incentive to register, but then it feels too marketing-y and might scare people off.
contactdick
No the shop doesn't get the email address. I wouldn't want that either!! They can choose a banner ad to appear on your email receipt based on keywords. The receipt is sent from our system and we don't give them your email.

The shops register with us but the customers can choose to give their email on the till or register a barcode to swipe at the till (any barcode will do) that maps to an email in our system.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
SHOwnsYou
Build in a module to include upsells in the receipt email and then increase your monthly price by double.

When I worked for an e-commerce shop, I started including upsells in the order confirmation emails and got something like a 12% increase in revenue.

contactdick
Great idea. We allow retailers to include one advert per receipt. This advert can be transaction based, meaning when someone purchases a pair of jeans, the retailer can create a rule to show the current offer for a matching belt. Does that go in the direction you mean?
SHOwnsYou
Right, exactly like this.

Though I had more success when showing 3 products (I split tested up to 5 products).

zck
With this kind of thing, here's what I worry about: what if the store decides to charge you $X+5, where the real price is only $5? When a receipt is handed to me at point of sale, I can catch anything different there and bring it up then. After that, I know the receipt is good. Who would pull out their phone to check their email and make sure the receipt is valid?
contactdick
Good point. For everyone who actually wants to check the receipt at the POS there is an option to also receive a paper receipt (i.e. email and paper). If the receipt is ok, you can throw away the paper receipt and keep the email receipt for potential future changes/returns/expense claims etc. Now this defeats the environmentally benefit of email receipts but is a way around it. Some retailers let their customers look at customer-facing till screens while scanning the purchase items.