What is Crumple, and why are we replacing the paper receipt?

Think about the last receipt you were handed. There is a good chance it went straight into a bag, a pocket or the bin by the door - and if you needed it a few weeks later, a good chance it had faded, crumpled or vanished altogether.

Crumple exists to fix that. We are a UK company, based in Newcastle upon Tyne, building a better way to hand over and hold on to receipts: digital ones, sent straight from the till to your phone. This article explains what Crumple is, why we started it, and the problems with paper receipts that convinced us it was worth doing.

What is Crumple?

Crumple is a complete, end-to-end replacement for the paper receipt. It has two halves, built to work together:

• For shoppers, a free app for iOS and Android. Every receipt from every participating retailer lands in one wallet, itemised, searchable and ready whenever you need to make a return, claim on a warranty or check what you actually spent.
• For businesses, a dashboard for issuing Crumple receipts - straight from an existing till system through our API, or by hand from the dashboard itself. Every receipt carries the business’s own branding, and the dashboard shows who is actually shopping with them.

At the till, the whole interaction is a scan. The customer points the Crumple app at a QR code and the receipt is in their wallet before they have put their card away. There is no email address to read out, no loyalty card to find and nothing to type.

Why we built Crumple

Receipts are one of the few parts of shopping that have barely changed in decades. Card payments went contactless, then moved onto our phones, while the receipt stayed a strip of thermal paper. And it is not working for anyone:

• Shoppers lose them. Receipts get thrown away, go through the wash or fade until they are unreadable - usually just before they are needed for a return or a warranty claim.
• Paper is not accessible to everyone. Small, faint print is hard or impossible to read for many people with sight loss. A digital receipt can be enlarged, and Crumple includes clear audio playback for anyone who would rather listen.
• Businesses pay for paper. Till roll costs money, printers jam and rolls run out mid-rush - all to produce something most customers never wanted to keep.
• The alternatives ask too much. Emailed receipts mean asking customers to read out an email address at the counter, slowing the queue and signing their inbox up to yet another mailing list.

Crumple was built to solve all of those at once, rather than trade one for another. That is why receipts come from the till rather than an inbox, why the app is free for shoppers, and why we do not fill it with intrusive ads.

The true cost of a paper receipt

Paper receipts are so ordinary that their scale is easy to miss. These are the numbers that stood out to us:

• 11.2bn

  paper receipts estimated to be handed out by UK retailers every year^[1]

• 65%

  of UK shoppers have lost a receipt they later needed for a return or exchange^[2]

• 93%

  of US paper receipts estimated to be coated with BPA or BPS^[3]

• 3m+

  trees, and 10 billion gallons of water, used to make receipts every year in the US alone^[3]

Most receipts cannot be recycled

Most till receipts are printed on thermal paper, which carries a heat-sensitive chemical coating instead of ink. That coating means thermal receipts are not treated as paper for recycling, and councils such as Worcestershire ask residents to keep them out of their recycling bins altogether^[4]. So most of the receipts we are handed end up in the general rubbish, often after a few seconds of use.

The chemicals on the paper

The coating on thermal paper has long relied on bisphenol A (BPA) or bisphenol S (BPS), chemicals known to disrupt the body’s hormones^[3]. Since 2 January 2020, thermal paper containing 0.02% or more BPA by weight cannot be supplied in Great Britain^[5].

That rule did not take bisphenols off our receipts, though. Much of the industry switched to BPS, a close chemical relative of BPA - the European Chemicals Agency expected 61% of thermal paper in the EU to be BPS-based by 2022^[6]. In Great Britain, the Health and Safety Executive is now examining whether BPA has simply been replaced by other bisphenols with similar hazards^[5].

None of which matters for a receipt that is never printed in the first place.

How Crumple helps

Every Crumple receipt is a paper receipt that never gets printed. Beyond that, it is simply a better receipt.

For shoppers

• Never lose a receipt. Every receipt is kept safe in your wallet, searchable by shop, date or item.
• Hassle-free returns. Show your digital receipt’s QR code in store instead of hunting through a drawer.
• Nothing to hand over. Scan a QR code at the till - no email address and nothing to type.
• Free, and built for everyone. No intrusive ads, and clear audio playback for anyone who would rather listen than read.

For businesses

• No paper, no printing. No till roll to buy, no roll changes and no printer jams.
• Your brand on every receipt. Upload your logo once and it appears on every receipt you issue.
• A faster checkout. Nobody spells out an email address at the counter - your customer scans and goes.
• Insight into your customers. Receipt, age and gender breakdowns and a customer location heatmap, from the Pro plan upwards.
• Receipts kept for you. Every receipt is stored for a minimum of six years.

If you run a business, see how Crumple works for business, with plans from £9 a month.

What’s next

Crumple is live today on iOS and Android, with businesses already issuing receipts through it and more joining all the time. We will use this blog to share what is new: the retailers coming on board, new features in the app and the dashboard, and more on the case for leaving paper behind.

Download Crumple free from the App Store or Google Play, and your next receipt does not have to be paper.