【1989 Archives】

LONDON — Tesco989 Archivestesting a paperless system which sends a record of your purchases to your smartphone - the first major U.K. retailer to experiment with a digital receipt service.

In Harlow, Essex, customers can tap a unique sticker on a special terminal at the till following their purchases.

The terminal then sends a digital receipt to a pre-installed mobile app, which allows customers to keep a record of their purchases.

“We’re always looking for ways to make the shopping trip a little bit easier for customers. We’re currently trialling a digital receipt service in one of our stores which will allow customers to keep a record of all their receipts in one place," a Tesco spokesman told Mashable.

The trial, which has been going on for a few months, will end by mid-November and Tesco will be speaking to customers to get their thoughts before deciding whether to roll it out more widely.

Tesco, Britain's biggest retailer, is "trying to get a better perspective on how far and wide" the paperless receipt experiment could go, the spokesman said.

It started after observing how some customers find it tricky to hold onto a number of paper receipts.

Data is stored anonymously and Tesco cannot use the collected information for marketing, the company said.

Tesco was in the spotlight earlier this month after it stopped selling popular household brands after a price dispute with its major supplier, Unilever. 

The dispute was later resolved with a compromise.

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