A new application hopes that South Africans will bury paper till slips to make smartphones more integral to the e-shopping environment.

PocketSlip is an application that records your shopping expenses, much like a digital till slip.

“We have been speaking about the paperless environment for ages and PocketSlip will be another chip off the block of ‘paper mountain’,” said CEO Brett Lowe.

Because the receipts are stored digitally, it allows consumers to more easily conduct returns or warranty replacements for products.

However, adoption is a significant challenge to the application.

“The idea has been around for some time. However, the biggest challenge is to get the big retail chains to understand that yes, they can do this themselves and some already are doing it to email, but customers do not want an app for their Woolworths till slips, their Pick n Pay till slips; their Mr Price till slips,” said Lowe.

“Customers want one that collates them all so that they can budget and find them all together. PocketSlip will be that app,” he added.

Another challenge is to convince retailers who have loyalty programmes to join the platform, which could also help save money. Thermal paper commonly used for receipts cost anywhere from R1,61 to R6,46/roll.

Financial apps are growing in momentum, but Lowe said that PocketSlip does not compete with Old Mutual’s money managing application 22seven.

“Funnily enough, I’ve already spoken to [22seven CEO] Christo Davel. They have all the banks transaction data on their customers, we could complement this by giving them the basket information. So that R5 356,90 transaction at Sportsman’s Warehouse was a bicycle purchase.”

For the collaboration to work, though, Lowe said that they would have to navigate the Protection of Personal Information Act (Popi) which prohibits sharing of personal consumer information.

“We would work together rather than compete. There would be a big Popi hurdle that we would need to look at though before we could work on this.” — Fin24