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It is common for customers to lose, misplace, or even throw away receipts, and often without considering that they may need to return or exchange a purchased item, for one reason or another. It is also common for customers to lose or misplace product warranty and/or manufacturer contact information, all of which should be stored in a network of digital receipts. Ideally, all retailers would electronically retain itemized receipts of all customer purchases, and make this information accessible to customers and sales associates or customer service representatives who are responsible for processing returns and exchanges, and via online store accounts for which the said customer service representatives and/or store management and customers would create logins.

Customers who do not pay for purchases with debit, credit, EBT, or gift cards, or by other means via which they would be intrinsically identified would be asked to provide their names and other relevant demographic information during purchases so that store associates can save the transactions to the customers’ accounts…

Digital receipts should also be interactive/informational and provide product warranty and manufacturer contact information via clicking of links and/or informational networks that would also link to customers’ electronic bank and/or credit card statements.

Customers should be capable of readily accessing their itemized receipts via their bank or credit card statements by clicking on specific transactions and (optionally) logging in to the relevant store account that they’d be directed to, or a consumer portal that would store all personalized digital receipts.

The consumer portal should be capable of extracting information from the digital receipts and sorting it by expense categories, like clothing, school supplies, bill payments, etc., and consumers should be capable of specifying who the purchases were for, i.e. themselves, children, or others. Consumers should also be capable of privatizing some or all items on itemized receipts when sharing their digital expense reports with requesting agencies, etc.

Consumers with or without bank or credit card accounts would be capable of viewing a comprehensive/interactive listing of all of their digital/itemized receipts via the noted portal, as opposed to, or in addition to creating distinctive logins for every synonymous store, or at least those that are most frequented and/or where products with warranties are purchased…

A system of the sort would provide both retailers and consumers with a method of verifying purchases, warranties, dates of purchases, etc., particularly during return and/or exchange processes.

It would also help to magnify and retain stats of consumer spending habits, for the benefit of retailers and consumers, and agencies, like the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), etc., that would suggest improvements and/or compliments to those shopping habits…