I have been following a lot of the discussion since we announced our new partnership with Schuh and I’d like to add some clarity on a few points:
The environmental impact
Returning to the roots behind why Flux came into being our CEO & co-founder Matty wrote a post explaining this here, https://blog.tryflux.com/why-we-do-what-we-do-cf9ee6edd8e1
A big reason for me joining the company was because I share in this belief. If we want to continue living on earth we have to live sustainably; if we have the capability to remove an entirely unnecessary source of waste in paper receipts, isn’t this something that should already exist?
We recently launched our Beat the Receipt (https://beatthereceipt.com/) campaign to raise awareness and to allow consumers to encourage business leaders to make a change. We believe paper receipts to be running on borrowed time and with enough support the transfer to digital solutions will be faster.
Many of you have rightly asked about the scale of the environmental problem and have drawn comparisons to other problems such as plastic wastage.
The estimated number of receipts printed each year is around 300 billion with 11 billion in the UK alone. A receipt is made up of 3 core components, wood (25 million trees), oil (22 million barrels of oil) and water (18 billion litres of water).
Whilst we do not claim that getting rid of paper receipts to be the biggest environmental issue on the planet we are removing an entirely unnecessary one and it is part of a holistic approach advocated on World Recycling day advised to truly make a dent in resolving this problem.
Data concerns
Our data protection and compliance head Farhana, published an excellent piece outlining our approach to privacy here: https://blog.tryflux.com/what-do-the-fca-ico-have-in-common-gdpr-7e54564694f0
However in summary,
- Nothing identifiable is ever shared with third parties e.g. email address
- Our back-end structure is built with bank-like security standards
- Whether a retailer or individual user, any data that passes through us is encrypted in transit and at rest
- Data shared with retail partners is always aggregated and anonymised e.g. groups of customers that buy apples also like to buy bananas
Google Pay & Apple Pay
There has been some confusion as to whether Flux works when using your smartphone to make a payment. Flux does work with these methods of payment but if you have experienced an issue with not receiving a digital receipt or a missing loyalty stamp this should not be attributed to your method of payment but an issue on our side with using the information to generate a digital version. We are working very hard on fixing these issues - it’s our biggest priority at the moment.
We also do not currently support Kiosks at KFC, although we are working on changing this.
Warranties & Returns
A lot of good questions have been asked about using Flux receipts for warranties and returns and we can assure you that Flux digital receipts will be able to work for both. The receipt ID at the bottom of the receipt is the key information you’ll need for a return.
