Receipt data

Receipt data captures item-level purchases from digital and scanned receipts: what was bought, at which retailer, at what price and together with what else. Brands use it to track share, switching and promotions, retailers to understand baskets and competitors, and investors to follow sales trends for consumer companies.

Typical fields

• Retailer and store banner
• Item description, normalized product, brand and category
• Price paid, quantity and discounts
• Basket ID and basket total (pseudonymous)
• Purchase date and channel
• Panelist demographics and weights, aggregated or pseudonymized

Sources and collection

Receipts come from opt-in consumer panels: people scan paper receipts in a rewards app or connect email accounts so digital receipts can be parsed with their consent. Providers extract items with OCR and parsing, normalize abbreviated item descriptions to products and brands, and weight panelists to the population. Item normalization quality is the main difference between providers.

Delivery and pricing

Delivery is usually weekly or monthly aggregated tables by brand, category and retailer, or pseudonymized basket-level files for advanced users, via files, cloud shares or dashboards. Price depends on categories, retailers, panel size, history and granularity.

Before you buy

• Ask how consent is collected and what panelists were told about data sharing.
• Check panel size per retailer and category before slicing the data.
• Ask how item descriptions are matched to products and the match rate.
• Confirm basket-level data is pseudonymized and cannot identify people.
• Check panel churn and the weighting method.