American Express Launches Digital Receipts Feature To Provide Transaction Detail

American Express is rolling out a new digital receipts functionality, which gives clients a look into specific transaction data for purchases from companies such as Apple, Square, Microsoft and Google, according to an announcement emailed to PYMNTS.

Digital receipts will let card members identify and monitor their purchases from select retailers. Members can see in-depth purchase data using the feature like merchant name and logo, date of order, order number and product(s) purchased, among other data points. They can find the data through the Amex website or app.

Members can recognize legitimate purchases provided that there is now further information around what they bought through the web and when they made those transactions with the feature. The company also says that members can decrease the frequency of calls to confirm details of their digital transactions and decrease the number of disputed charges with the functionality.

According to recent Amex Trendex data, 70 percent of consumers in the U.S. have reached out to their credit card company over a purchased believed to be fraudulent or not correct at first but was, in fact, a valid charge that they or a family member had made.

Among the more unfortunate effects of the great digital shift for merchants — especially small ones — has been a large increase in fraud and chargebacks.

Chargebacks have always been an issue, but for those retailers that ran mainly through brick-and-mortar stores before the pandemic, it wasn’t a top-of-mind concern, PAAY CEO Yitz Mendlowitz told PYMNTS in a recent conversation.

But with the quick pivot to digital business and card-not-present transactions, and the mass influx of fraudsters that came along with it, retailers found themselves encountering levels of fraud not seen before.

“When they pivot to online — even if everything about the transaction stays the same, it’s the same merchant accounts, selling the same items, to the same cardholder, using the same card — the difference is instead of it being an in-store card, the transaction now shifts to eCommerce, and those conversion rates can drop by 20 percent,” Mendlowitz said.

The reason those conversions are declining, he noted, is because merchants are suddenly declining many more of those transactions — because they feel they have to do so. Given the choice between allowing a bad transaction to go through and inadvertently blocking a good one, merchants will often choose the latter.