Today New York City-based Note Social launched its platform in private beta to help consumers keep, store and organize receipts from both offline and online purchases. The company also launched an API for online merchants to integrate with their backend so that when users purchase an item online, they’ll have the option to send their receipts to their Note Social account, or for offline merchants to send receipts to Note Social from the register. This is the first of several planned features all with the goal of creating a more seamless shopping experience where users don’t have to continually input their credit card information, their shipping addresses, and worry about the security of their information.
“What we wanted to do was eliminate the need for me to constantly take out my wallet and enter my credit card, shipping address, billing address around the web all the time, and store that data on multiple sites around the web. It’s extremely insecure, I don’t care how many sites say it’s secure, I wouldn’t want my stuff out there,” CEO AJ Glassberg said in an interview. “There’s an obvious fix to their problem, its called the one-click buy, there’s a few flaws with it though, one that Amazon owns everything about it, the other is that you’re limited to one card, one shipping address, unless you go in and change them yourself.”
Note Social wants to be the place where consumers store all their receipts, credit cards and shipping addresses. Currently consumers get confirmations, receipts and notifications sent to their emails, however, Glassberg points out that they soon get buried within a matter of minutes and don’t provide users with a storage point to keep track of all their purchases. Note Social will allow consumers to store their online receipts, see which stores they buy from the most, and add offline purchase receipts to their account.
The company hasn’t announced any retailer partners yet, but it has partnered with Seconds, an SMS-based mobile payments solution that launched earlier this month. The other key issue the company wants to solve is constantly having to enter credit cards and shipping details during checkout, and later next month it will be doing a rollout of its ‘buy button,’ similar to Amazon’s one-click buy system.
The natural extension of the platform will be users sharing their purchases, and the ability for merchants to get better data or offer deals on the platform. Some of the monetization of the platform for Note Social will revolve around giving retailers the opportunity to add coupons, promo codes, and other promotions on the receipts themselves to drive their buying behaviour fill a huge void between offline and online purchases.
“The receipts along with the buy button allows for extremely targeted advertising because you know what the person likes to buy, what they bought, and probably what they’re going to buy next. And over time you do, with the buy button, we’ve built in metrics that measure your social value,” Glassberg said.
Consumers can already track receipts when they buy items using mobile wallets like Google Wallet or Square, and Lemon’s app lets users scan and store hard copy receipts. Similar to other mobile payments and digital receipt storage companies, the key to success will be retailer adoption, both online and offline.
Users will only use Note Social as a default way to pay and store their receipts if it’s available at the retailers they visit regularly, otherwise they’ll have to manually add receipts to their account, something they can already do with a variety of financial apps. As for one-click buying, while Amazon’s solution might be limited to its own site, PayPal offers an easy checkout solution for consumers who don’t want to constantly enter their payment information. Glassberg believes a seamless payment experience is missing in today’s market, but time will tell if Note Social is the platform that can provide a solution.
