With more transactions for digital goods and daily deals along with electronic receipts from brick-and-mortar retailers flowing through email inboxes, it’s becoming harder for shoppers to keep track of all this activity. That’s where Project Slice’s All My Purchases app comes in. The start-up, which is coming out of stealth mode, is introducing an app for the new Yahoo Mail that organizes a user’s online receipts, shipping notices and daily deals and helps people make sense of it all, like Mint, but for online purchases.
The Palo Alto company is not only introducing its new product but also announcing $ 9.4 million in Series A funding led by DCM and Lightspeed Venture Partners with additional investments by Bebo founder Michael Birch, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Mike Maple’s Floodgate Fund and Playdom founder Rick Thompson.
All My Purchases helps users quickly track all their purchases from various merchants and get quick access to item level details in receipts. This can be good just for understanding a person’s purchase history. But it’s also helpful for when they need to make returns or follow up with customer service. All My Purchases extracts customer service numbers, return policies and order numbers so it’s easy for people to return an item. All My Purchases also helps users track items that are being delivered. The app charts when an item is set to arrive and provides a map to show its progress.
Scott Brady, CEO and co-founder of Project Slice said the idea was born last year out of the frustration of having to manage a growing amount of transactions through his email account. He said 1 billion people use their email for purchases. Though email receipts can be searched for, there’s no structured way to gather up a user’s e-mail receipts in one place. He said the team of 25 engineers built a product that uses semantic parsing to extract and organize the data from e-mail receipts. The company is now able to provide item level detail for 80 percent of merchants such as Amazon, eBay, Best Buy and Groupon and 100 percent coverage for shipping information.
The free app will be available to 89 million Yahoo mail users in the U.S. with the release of the new Yahoo Mail in the coming week. Users have to sign-in through oAUTH to have all their purchases organized. Slice also has Gmail in beta testing and hopes to have that available soon.
I like where All My Purchases is going. It’s good to have all this transaction information in one place, allowing me to see what I’ve done in the past, how much I’m spending and what exact items I’ve purchased. With more retailers like Apple also offering emailed receipts for in-store purchases and more mobile payments channeling their receipts through email, it makes even more sense to have an app like this.
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