The Receipt Footer Most Shops Leave Blank

What comes home in the bag

A customer unpacks a shopping bag at home, and folded among the purchases is the receipt: the store's name, the date, the items, the total and one line about returns.

Below that sits a thank-you, or nothing, then the edge where the paper was torn.

That slip goes home with most customers. It gets tucked into wallets, checked against card statements and carried back with returns.

Its last few lines cost nothing to print, and most shops leave them blank.

Space the till already has

Almost every point-of-sale system and electronic cash register has fields for header and footer text. Someone filled in the header at installation, and nobody came back for the footer.

Those lines cost the same whether they say something useful or not. The only work is choosing the words and making sure the page they mention exists.

What is worth printing there

• The web address, short and spelled the way people type it.
• The hours, including the evening you stay open late.
• A line about reviews, with a short address explaining where to leave one.
• One seasonal note, such as holiday hours or a gift order deadline.
• The returns policy, in one sentence a customer can act on.

Pick two or three. An eight-line footer makes every receipt longer, and long receipts get skimmed like long emails.

The address and the hours make the safest pair, since they answer what people most often look up later.

An address that leads somewhere

Someone who types an address from a receipt has a reason: to order again, check the hours, find a product they saw or leave a review.

The home page makes each of them hunt. The domain followed by a slash and one word, such as gifts or review, takes them straight to the right page.

Keep the word short and lowercase, and make sure the address works with or without the www in front. A receipt line holds roughly forty characters, so long addresses wrap or get cut off.

The page behind the footer

Write that page for someone holding the receipt. If the footer promises gift boxes, the page shows the boxes, prices and ordering, not a welcome message.

If the footer asks for a review, the page explains in two sentences why reviews matter to a small shop, then links to the review sites where you are listed.

People who follow it review later, on their own phones and accounts. Review sites treat those as ordinary reviews, unlike a burst typed at the counter on one device.

Leave rewards out. Review sites generally forbid discounts or draws in exchange for reviews, and a printed offer puts that in writing.

A worked example

A fudge shop in a lakeside resort town cooks its fudge in copper kettles in the front window. Most summer customers are visitors buying boxes to take home.

Every autumn, people who had visited in July phoned to ask whether the shop could ship fudge. It could, but hardly anyone knew.

The receipts carried the name, the phone number and a no-returns line for food. The website mentioned shipping on its contact page, below the parking directions.

The owner added a gift box page with flavours, box sizes, shipping days and the final order date for Christmas delivery, at the domain followed by the word ship.

The footer now offers fudge shipped anywhere in Canada at that address, with the winter hours below. Gift receipts carry the same lines.

The receipt goes home with the very people who cannot walk back in, so the footer answers their question before they think to phone.

Changing the footer in the till

On most point-of-sale systems the footer is a few lines of free text under the receipt or printing settings, applied from the next receipt at every till sharing them.

Older cash registers keep it in a programming mode set out in the manual, often with a short limit per line. Without the manual, the dealer who services the register can change it.

If the system also emails receipts, update that template too. An emailed receipt can carry a link to tap.

Print a test receipt after every change. Then type the printed address into a phone exactly as it appears and see where it lands.

Keeping the footer true

Footers outlive the pages they mention. The site is rebuilt, the gift page moves, and every receipt printed afterwards leads to a missing page.

Whoever looks after the website should keep a list of every address printed anywhere, from receipts to bags and signs, and redirect each one when the site changes.

Hours date just as quickly. Summer hours still printed in December send people to a locked door.

Seeing whether anyone types it

An address printed only on receipts is also a simple measure. In Google Analytics, visits that land on it with no referring site are mostly people typing it from the paper.

That will not show what they bought, but it shows whether the footer is read at all.

The counter-case

Some shops hand out few paper receipts. A coffee counter where most people wave the slip away, or a shop that emails receipts by default, gets little from the footer.

Others serve regulars who know the hours by heart. For them the footer repeats what they already know.

But the lines cost nothing, gift receipts reach people who have never been in, and returns bring the paper back. A short, current footer is worth printing even when few read it.

Putting the footer to work

1. Read a receipt from your own till as a customer would.
2. Choose two or three lines for the footer.
3. Pick a short address for each line that needs one.
4. Build the page each address leads to.
5. Change the footer in the till, or ask the dealer.
6. Type the printed address into a phone.
7. Review the footer each season and after every site change.

Step four is where most footers fall down. A customer who types an address from a receipt has already chosen to come back, and a home page or a missing page wastes that.

A tablet by the till for leaving reviews explains why a shared tablet at the counter is the wrong way to collect reviews, and how to ask so customers write them later on their own phones.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.