How keeping copies of your receipts can help you beat rising grocery bills
BEAT rising grocery bills by earning cash and rewards on your everyday shopping.
Inflation has hit 10.1 per cent and is expected to keep rising.
That means a family spending £100 a week on food could be facing an increase of more than £520 a year for their grocery shopping.
But firms will pay for your shopping secrets, says Samantha Partington, and it’s a useful way to offset your costs. Here’s how . . .
How do shop and scan apps work?
TWO popular receipt-scanning apps are Shoppix and Huyu, which can be downloaded on the App Store or Google Play.
Shoppix offers tokens in exchange for answering short surveys on your shopping experiences and snapping pictures of your receipts in the app.
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You get 30 tokens per receipt and can snap up to 30 receipts a week.
Turn your tokens into vouchers for your favourite retailers or transfer the money into a PayPal account.
You need 3,200 tokens for £5.
Huyu works in a similar way but it only accepts receipts from supermarkets.
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You can earn five points per paper receipt and ten points for an e-receipt.
Reach 500 points to get a £5 voucher.
You’ll need to check the app to see which shops are available when you cash out. Amazon Shopper Panel is an invitation-only receipt-scanning app.
Download it to your phone to join the waiting list.
To earn £5 to spend on Amazon, you must forward ten receipts a month for purchases outside of Amazon.
Earn extra points by taking part in surveys.
Shop & Scan works differently, as it’s not a smartphone app. Instead, you’ll be sent a barcode scanner by post.
You’ll need to plug it into a computer via a USB cable
After each shop you must scan the barcodes of all the items and answer questions about your shopping trip.
You can earn up to 1,600 points a week, with 10,000 points equalling £10.
You are rewarded with vouchers which can be spent with brands such as Amazon, Spotify, Foot Locker, Uber and Argos.
Both Shop & Scan and Shoppix are run by research company Kantar.
I scan and save for kids' gifts
AFTER unpacking her shopping, Bryony Lewis swipes each item with a barcode scanner – to earn vouchers to spend on her two children’s birthday and Christmas presents.
Online gift shop owner Bryony, 38, who lives in Portsmouth with husband Dan, 37, an engineering manager, and their kids Theo, six, and Isabelle, four, says: “Since I started using the Shop & Scan app eight years ago, I have earned £400 in vouchers.”
Scanning her shopping takes five minutes. She says: “I do it as I’m unpacking, it’s just one extra step.”
Fresh fruit, veg and meat from the butcher with no labels are scanned by selecting the relevant barcode from a booklet that comes with the scanner.
Bryony, whose business T & Belle specialises in gifts for mums, says it takes her a few months to reach 10,000 reward points, which she then cashes in for a £10 voucher.
She adds of the vouchers: “There’s a big choice of shops but I usually go for Amazon – you can buy almost anything from there.”
Why do firms want receipts?
HOW shoppers are spending their money, week in and week out, is valuable knowledge.
When you share this information about your habits with researchers, they then sell it on to companies so they can improve their marketing strategies and sell more products.
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But before divulging how you shop, check privacy terms to see how your details are treated.
Some firms promise you cannot be identified from any of the information you share.
Tips & Tricks
HOW shoppers are spending their money, week in and week out, is valuable knowledge.
When you share this information about your habits with researchers, they then sell it on to companies so they can improve their marketing strategies and sell more products.
But before divulging how you shop, check privacy terms to see how your details are treated.
Some firms promise you cannot be identified from any of the information you share.
