To be competitive, online businesses must provide an excellent frontend customer experience, with intuitive shoppability for locating items, colours, sizes – whatever the customer needs to make their selection and seamlessly move through a smooth, secure checkout. 

Just as important, however, is the post-transaction experience you deliver. This potentially is the difference between keeping the sale or having it end in a chargeback, with not only the loss of the sale, but also potentially the customer, as well. Providing digital receipts by email is a good first step sellers can take to save the sale and the relationship. When customers have questions about their transactions with your business, no one is more prepared to answer them than you.

Elevating the post-transaction experience

What makes a good post-transaction experience? In a word, communication. If you think about all the options customers have to make purchases, both e-commerce and physical locations, with family members sometimes sharing the same account or card, then post-transaction communication is simply smart business. 

Many sellers may provide a basic transaction receipt, or a targeted follow-up marketing message, but an enhanced, detailed digital receipt can be the kind of customer service that distinguishes your business from your competitors. Here are a couple of ways digital receipts enhance the post-transaction experience:

• Uncover Family Fraud

• When a purchase is made by a family member without the cardholder’s knowledge, there is a higher likelihood that the purchase will be reported as fraudulent. By listing the device and email address used for the transaction, the cardholder can determine which family member made the purchase.

• Clarify Confusing Bank Statements

• Banking statements, both online and off, can have limited transaction information, often only including transaction date, post-date, amount, and merchant descriptor. A detailed digital receipt can clarify a lot of customer confusion stemming from this lack of transaction information. Giving the customer more information about their transactions is not only good customer service but may help prevent disputes as well.

Digital receipts can also mitigate “friendly fraud” or “first-party fraud,” when the customer seeks a refund for a valid sale. This can happen for any number of reasons. Maybe the customer forgot they made the purchase, doesn’t recognise it on their statement, has buyer’s remorse, or is knowingly committing digital shoplifting. By listing the device and email used for the purchase, along with detailed business information, the customer will be able to validate the transaction or give digital shoplifting a serious second thought.

Ideally, a digital receipt – either delivered by email or through a third party service – will help prevent a dispute altogether and save a customer relationship. Cost per acquisition can be pricey when considering all of the marketing, advertising, and PR costs that go into acquiring a new customer. It’s easier and less expensive to retain an existing one. So, a bump in operational costs or extra time spent creating a digital receipt is a wise investment.

Seller-initiated digital receipt best practices

Remember, when you create a digital receipt for your business, you’re representing your brand. So, make it engaging, well-designed, and even contain a marketing message. But don’t forget, the main purpose is to help validate the transaction for a cardholder who may not be the person who made the purchase – a scenario that can happen when multiple people are tied to a single credit card. 

Stay connected to your customers through issuer collaboration

By providing your own digital receipt, you have performed due diligence in keeping your customer informed of a valid transaction, including the information to validate it. This is also good evidence should you require it for chargeback representment. But what if your customer misfiles the email or, like 76% of people with a transaction inquiry, just calls their issuer?

Sharing data with issuers is also important. Ensuring this data transfer happens in near real time and at the issuer’s request is vital. It empowers the issuer’s call centre to help validate a transaction and prevent a dispute at the point of first customer inquiry – while on the phone with them. This extends your customer service to issuer call centres, providing an improved customer experience and preventing disputes from entering the payments ecosystem. That’s some serious collaboration for a lot of wins.

Differentiating your value with better customer service

With footfall in the UK expected to drop 62% in the run up to Christmas, e-commerce sales will continue to rise in a corresponding way, so it’s more important than ever to stand out among your competitors. An informative email digital receipt is a low investment, high reward way to do just that – an easy win for you and your customers.