Q&A: Edward Drax, MD, Yocuda Digital Receipts
Edward Drax, Managing Director of Yocuda, is at the forefront of transforming retail experiences through cutting-edge digital receipt solutions. With a passion for leveraging technology to bridge the gap between in-store and online shopping, Edward has helped some of the world’s leading retailers identify more store customers, boost post-purchase engagement, and achieve sustainability goals.
Can you tell us a bit about your background?
After starting out as an account manager at Saatchi & Saatchi, I’ve gained experience across various companies and sectors, including as a development director for a commercial property company, and as managing director at a health & fitness business providing boutique fitness holidays in Kenya & Crete. I started at Yocuda over 13 years ago as one of the founding directors, and have had the pleasure of watching it expand globally into 46 countries and become part of the Global Blue Group, the market leader in Tax-Free Shopping, 3.5 years ago.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
Never Miss a Retail Update!At Yocuda, we’ve reinvented the concept of receipts and their role in retail. Our digital receipts solution replaces traditional paper receipts with dynamic digital versions that enable customer identification in-store, engage customers post-purchase, build loyalty and help retailers achieve their sustainability goals.
Our USP lies in providing retailers with a new high-performing marketing channel with 75% open rates, seamlessly integrated into any POS system in any country.
Another key advantage is our experience and scale. As the world leader in this space, we’ve processed over 2.2 billion digital receipts and identified more than 215 million customers for our retail clients—and counting! And with our global reach, we’ve encountered and overcome a huge variety of challenges with languages, legislation and fiscal requirements.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
Our platform stands out by delivering value across various business priorities. It empowers customer experience teams, data analysts, and marketers with data capture, insights, and engagement; supports technology teams with seamless integrations; and aids CSR leaders in implementing sustainable practices, not to mention the end customers who love the convenience of it!
This ability to address such a wide range of requirements across a retail business and to provide a unique customer touchpoint makes our solution truly special and something people genuinely love to use.
What advantage does it add?
Our solution enables retailers to identify 50–80% of their in-store customers, enriching their CRM systems and improving loyalty.
With 75% open rates and click-through rates up to 15%, digital receipts outperform traditional marketing emails, offering a powerful communication channel for engaging customers post-purchase. Think product recommendations, loyalty sign-ups, review and feedback surveys, brand content, editorial and events, App downloads, offers & promotions and a wide range of content related to the items purchased like warranties, how-to videos, tips & tutorials, product provenance, nutrition & recipes and customer care information. All of this can be dynamically inserted into the digital receipt to continue the customer conversation.
And, by eliminating paper receipts, retailers reduce paper and print costs and align with sustainability goals, which is increasingly important for both businesses and their customers.
How does a product/service implementation look like and how do you measure success?
Every retailer has unique needs, so we begin by aligning on requirements, the preferred integration methodology and an implementation timeline. With timely turnarounds, a project should take no longer than 2-3 months, although our record from initial discussion to being live in-store is 15 working days. Once live, we work closely with store teams to ensure strong adoption. We support this through train-the-trainer sessions, KPIs, dashboards and custom reporting that provide visibility down to each store and each colleague in each store.
What qualifies success can vary from retailer to retailer, but typically, we measure success on the adoption rates of the digital receipts in-store and the engagement metrics of customers who receive a receipt. Paper and print savings and improved customer experience are also important criteria to track.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like? Can you share a case study with us?
With more than 70% of retail sales still taking place in a physical store, there is a huge untapped source of data and customer behaviour to be gleaned from this channel. Of course, loyalty programmes help retailers identify customers in-store and link them to their transactions, but for many retailers loyalty programmes are not a good fit or are too expensive. Even for retailers with loyalty programmes, there is often still a majority of customers, around 50%-60%, that do not sign up to the programme. In these scenarios, the digital receipt is a proven tool for closing the gap on unidentified store customers and the data can then be combined with ecom transaction data for a single customer view. Those insights feed directly into all parts of the retail ecosystem, for merchandising, ranging, personalisation and targeted marketing and therein lies the competitive advantage.
In regards to personalisation, the fantastic thing about this new age of receipts is that the content can be changed dynamically based on any number of rules or criteria. It can be personalised based on customer attributes, gender or segments, loyalty status, the items purchased in that transaction or historically, the store location, date and more. The opportunities to engage with customers are endless and as an example, Decathlon has seen excellent results using our digital receipts to enhance customer loyalty and engagement. You can read more about their success here.
Are there other companies you partner with?
There is such a plethora of retail solutions that help to drive sales and engagement and no one company can build them all. Hence to be relevant in the current retail world, partnerships with different tech providers are critical. We run a successful partner programme, led by Jamie our partnerships manager, that enables us to integrate with the best POS and Payment technologies on the market, as well as many other tech and payment vendors. Our existing partners include Adyen, Flooid, Cegid, Teamwork Commerce and many more, with existing integrations in place for many of them. Learn more about our partners on our partner page.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2025 / What challenges are retailers facing in 2025?
The accelerating technical landscape is for sure a challenge for retailers, many of whom are undertaking digital transformation projects to replace legacy tech solutions while seeking and integrating with the more recent best-in-class solutions. The now omnipresent talk of AI is manifesting itself in an exponential set of services and products and the arms race to secure customers’ wallets and loyalty has never been more urgent when facing an ever more fickle and well-informed customer. But of course, with all the change comes endless opportunity and if you get it right, the rewards and growth can follow fast.
Sustainability is another top priority for UK retailers, but the challenge lies in demonstrating and proving meaningful actions rather than appearing to pay lip service. Customers and stakeholders demand transparency and results, which raises the stakes for retailers looking to build trust. Our solution is a small part of the retail landscape, but it is a highly visible one to customers who are more and more basing their purchasing decisions on retailers’ sustainability credentials
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
We see ourselves as an enabler. The data that we can glean from stores is used to power many of the most important retail systems, both new and old. If you like, we are the tool that gathers the information and the pipes that then deliver it to the AI recommendations tool to the clienteling app or the latest CDP. That puts us at the centre of many discussions around customer insight and marketing strategies.
The digital receipt as a new communications channel is only recently gaining recognition for its huge potential to converse with customers who are your most engaged customers – ie they just purchased something! We believe that this customer touchpoint will attract increasing interest as retailers use it to promote different products and services – booking appointments, promoting repairs and resale opportunities and enabling returns from home or office. The tech landscape may be changing at speed around us, but as long as the digital receipt can act as a link between the offerings, it will remain highly relevant.
Sustainability has always been at the heart of what we do, so we will continue to educate retailers on the benefits of digital receipts when it comes to reducing carbon emissions. For example, one of our clients reduced their carbon emissions by 520 tonnes in 2024 alone, just by using our digital receipt solution – it would have taken 23,918 trees to absorb that amount of carbon!
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
We already work with some of the world’s biggest brands including Sainsbury’s, M&S, Decathlon and Sephora. However, we are incredibly focused on allowing more retailers to benefit from our solution and to open up new use cases for digital receipts. Some interesting opportunities include links to digital product passports which are to become a mandatory requirement in the next 3-4 years, authenticating luxury items to combat fakes and creating NFTs for a physical product’s digital twin to be used in the metaverse. And for sure we will be looking to expand our partnership programme further.
Any final thoughts?
Across retail tech, digital receipts are just one tiny part, but their ability to enable other solutions, increase customer insight, improve the customer experience and ultimately drive sales and loyalty make them an important part. In addition, the win for retailers regarding sustainability, albeit only a small part of the supply chain, is in delivering demonstrable evidence to customers of their commitment to eco-conscious decisions. At Yocuda, we’re committed to helping retailers thrive in this new era of customer experience.
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To find out how Yocuda can help your retail operation, you can visit them online here or connect with them here.
