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Comment by MonkeyMalarky | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone tried making a scannable code printed on receipts with an app for consumers that lets them scan the code to post reviews?

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I've seen QR codes (as well as URLs and input codes) on supermarket receipts in the UK. They're for reviewing the service, checkout staff, etc more than any product.

Google Surveys do a "scan in your receipt" thing to solicit place reviews.

Verifying customers only verifies that one thing. It doesn't stop fake reviews of "real" customers (happens a ton on Amazon), or influenced reviews "Leave us 5 stars and we'll give you a gift voucher", or all the other crap that spoils real reviews.

I occasionally wonder if state-funded reviewing might be a useful additional data point. "This does what it claims, appears well built". Obviously applying that to every product sold might be a stretch, but expensive essentials (eg white goods) would be a good opening target.

  > This does what it claims, appears well built

Sounds like an ISO certification. ISO 22000 already exists for food safety, so it's not too far fetched to propose a voluntary service-based certification. But it would add cost and risk, with probably little value added for the business.

State-funded reviewing of food businesses already exists, and has for decades. Check for the health department certificate in a restaurant or cafe. It's usually posted near the cash register.

Another way of doing this might be to audit payments of consumers —card processors, banks or some government layer over the top— to select 50 customers a month from a business and offer them each £5 cashback for a review.

It's out-of-loop, some time after the incident, ideally anonymous (so no other kickbacks). They might be able to do the same for products.

Hopefully enough people here read your comment and have already started :-)

I imagine the trick is going to be getting it to tie in with the PoS (Point of Sale) systems I think, so that it is seemless for the business owner/manager.

Seems like something PoS vendors could collaborate on. They don't need to own the review app, just be able to provide the tokens. Alternatively it could be some kind of add-on like cryptic looking codes restaurants in Québec have for their receipts: https://reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/6856/...

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