M-Commerce: I want digital receipts, now!

I was doing a bit of research on digital receipts and came across this article from Stephanie Clifford over at the New York Times.

Have a read:

Major retailers, including Whole Foods Market, Nordstrom, Gap Inc. (which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic), Anthropologie, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, have begun offering electronic versions of receipts, either e-mailed or uploaded to password-protected Web sites. And more and more customers, the retailers report, are opting for paperless.

“As consumers, we’re changing the way we shop,” said Jennifer Miles, who oversees retail systems at VeriFone, which makes checkout technology. “Customers are starting to want electronic receipts.”

via Digital Receipts at Stores Gain in Popularity – NYTimes.com.

I’ve written on this before — and it’s something that I’m rather surprisingly emotional about.

Is it emotional? Or perhaps it’s cold hard logic that’s driving me.

I don’t want paper! I want to be able to Google-it or Evernote-it.

Apple is the only company I can think of that will mail you an electronic receipt for a physical purchase. It’s super-super valuable. I really do value being able to query the receipts (“What was the serial number of that MacBook Pro I bought two years ago?”).

I really enjoy the whole check-out process. I like the fact that the Apple chap simply says, “Is it the ewan.net address?” at the end of the transaction. I nod and moments later, I hear an email arrive. Genius.

But what about beyond Apple? Isn’t it time we saw this kind of technology being implemented more often?

Wouldn’t it be cool if the retailer was able to tie your card number to an email account? So you give them the email address once… and every time you purchase something with that card, you automatically get an electronic receipt?

I’ll need to do some more investigating.

Does anyone know of any electronic receipt firms operating in the UK?