Customer’s personal information such as name, email address, or phone number should not be required by merchants, stores, or intermediaries for the simple act of receiving a receipt electronically. Customer purchases can be quite personal, so any system must guarantee privacy from all parties. Only the buyer should hold the keys to their personal information.

It must allow communication between the merchant and customer yet allow the customer to control/limit all undesirable communications. Without controls by the customer, incoming offers would quickly become overwhelming, leading to all of them being ignored. What constitutes “overwhelming offers?” Only the individual customer can decide that. Custom control will allow each individual to decide what kind of offer he wishes to receive and from whom.

In order to allow easy adoption by the merchant and customers, the system must be universal and require no special hardware. The system should adapt to the hardware and software that the users already have, not just at the point of sale. This might include “pay at the pump,” bills paid by mailed checks, purchases over the phone, internet purchases, and banking “bill pay” services. Paper receipts will still be around for the foreseeable future, so any flexible electronic receipt system must have an elegant, accurate and simple solution for converting old paper receipts into the same digital format used by newer electronic receipts.

In order for wide and general acceptance, electronic receipts must provide value by both making and saving money for both the customer and merchant.

It must be as easy as throwing a paper receipt into a shoebox. Human nature dictates that given the choice, the easy way prevails.

Encrypted backups must be performed automatically without user input and must be accessible from any device. Financial records are critical and their loss is unacceptable. Likewise, the records must be legally acceptable as proof of the transaction, their origins must be inscrutable, and all receipts must be verifiably accurate and unaltered indefinitely.

Electronic receipts must contain flexible structured data that can be easily adapted to the wide variety of data formats in use today by competing financial and database products. A standardized API should be provided that allows developers to easily integrate electronic receipts into existing software and infrastructure, no matter what programming language the software is built upon. This allows for consistent searches, queries, and aggregation across all products, despite the customer and merchant’s choice of software products. Regardless of the reasons for storage and categorization of receipts, any system must be sophisticated enough to adapt to the constantly changing world of information technology.

Ideally, a secure electronic receipt would facilitate an equally secure communication channel between all parties involved in the transaction – customer, merchant, and bank/credit service – helping reduce the intermediary fees involved in the traditional process of monetary transfers, while also reducing the oportunity for fraud.

Security failures will happen, so damage must be limited and responses simple, quick, and easily resolved. Recent corporate wide security lapses have resulted in large financial losses, long term negative publicity, and public mistrust. The industry must shield itself. Consequently, any security lapse cannot be system-wide and must be limited to a single individual’s mishandling of their own private key information. Stringently tested industry standard public key encryption technologies should be utilized so that only customers hold the key used to decrypt their records.