How are they benefiting?
In: Economics
My understanding is that the app company has a deal with retailers/manufacturers where the app company gets some money for all the receipts users submit (a fee for driving more people to shop at your store or buying your products). The app company uses some this money to pay users for the receipt uploads and keeps the rest as revenue
Same way customer rewards programs work: building profiles of what different types of people buy. These profiles can then be used to market at specific groups in certain ways. The receipt pictures apps will be paid for their data by companies who want that data to target advertising.
An infamous case of one store using that kind of data was Target. Based on certain purchases, they could predict fairly well if certain rewards customers were pregnant and would send baby related coupon books. And it wasn’t just “oh she bought a pregnancy test.” It was things like switching to unscented lotions/soaps, buying a purse large enough to act as a diaper bag, etc. They’d start sending baby/pregnancy related coupons with the goal of getting you to mainly shop at Target for baby stuff.
The reciept apps can build these kind of profiles based on wider data sets than just one store, then they can sell these profiles/trend data to other companies
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