Your digital receipt provider just shut down. Or they’ve been underperforming for months and you’ve finally decided to switch. Or you’ve outgrown what the platform can do, and the features you keep asking for never arrive. Whether you’re a Warrify customer or a retailer planning a deliberate move, the question is the same: how do you switch digital receipt providers without losing customer data, breaking your POS integration, or disrupting the receipt experience your customers already use?
The fear of digital receipt migration keeps retailers stuck on underperforming platforms far longer than they should be. Vendors benefit from this: the more opaque the switching process feels, the less likely you are to leave. But here’s what the actual timelines look like.
“Migration takes months”: an Austrian pharmacy chain completed a full platform switch in six weeks, including over the holiday period. “We’ll lose our data”: GDPR gives you data portability rights, and a 48-hour export rule protects you if you act quickly. “POS integration will be a nightmare”: pre-built connectors or a printer-based bypass mean POS is rarely the actual bottleneck.
This is the week-by-week playbook built from running real migrations for retailers across Europe. It covers data export, POS integration, customer communication, and go-live. If you’re planning a switch, or your provider has already gone under and you need to move now, this is the operational roadmap.
If you’re still evaluating which provider to switch to, start with our evaluation guide. This blog picks up where that one ends.
What to Do If Your Digital Receipt Provider Has Shut Down
The moment you learn your vendor is shutting down, or even suspect it, act on the 48-hour rule: export everything immediately. Do not wait for official communication. Do not wait for the “transition plan” email. If the vendor enters insolvency, an administrator takes control of the infrastructure, and keeping your dashboard accessible is not their priority.
In December 2025, digital receipt provider Warrify filed for insolvency. No continuation of the business was planned at the time of filing. If you’re one of the retailers affected, the migration timeline below applies directly to your situation.
Here’s what you need to secure before your access window closes:
- Customer contact details and opt-in/consent records (critical for GDPR compliance)
- Historical transaction data, including purchase histories and receipt content
- Receipt template configurations and branding assets
- API credentials and integration documentation
- Any analytics or reporting data you rely on for ongoing campaigns
What “shutdown” actually means for your live receipts depends on how they were delivered. Receipts sent as PDFs or stored directly on the customer’s device will survive. But if your receipts were hosted on the vendor’s infrastructure, a web portal or cloud-based receipt viewer, they may disappear when the servers go offline. This is more common than most retailers realise: many digital receipt providers host receipts centrally rather than delivering a standalone file to the customer’s device.
If your customers rely on accessing past receipts for warranty claims or returns, communicate proactively. Tell them that historical receipts from the previous provider may no longer be available, and that your new system will handle all future purchases. Frame it as an upgrade, not a loss.
The instinct in a shutdown scenario is to freeze. Resist it. The retailers who move fastest in these situations are the ones who treat the first 48 hours as a data preservation sprint, not a decision-making period. One Austrian pharmacy chain, facing a similar urgency, went from vendor loss to fully operational on a new platform in six weeks. The timeline is real. But it starts with securing your data first and choosing your next vendor second.
The Digital Receipt Migration Timeline: Week by Week
This is the section you bookmark. It covers the full migration process from the moment you decide to switch through a live, fully operational system across all your stores. The timeline assumes a mid-market retailer with 20 to 100 stores. Simpler setups move faster. More complex POS environments may add a week. But this is the realistic baseline.
Before You Start: Pre-Migration Checklist (Days 1-3)
Before contacting a new vendor or scheduling a kickoff, get your own house in order.
Export all data from your current provider. If they’re still operational, do this before you notify them you’re leaving. The 48-hour rule applies here too: once a vendor knows you’re switching, your negotiating position and access can shift. Protect your data first.
Document your current receipt flow end-to-end. How are receipts generated? What POS systems are involved across your stores? What does the customer-facing experience look like: QR code on a customer-facing display? QR printed on the paper receipt? Email delivery? App integration? You need a clear picture of what “current state” means before you can plan a transition.
Identify your stakeholders and get alignment. Four roles matter most: your CRM or marketing lead (owns the customer experience), your CIO or CTO (owns the technical sign-off), your store operations lead (owns rollout logistics), and your legal or compliance lead (owns the GDPR consent question). Get these four people in a room, or at least on a thread, before you engage a new vendor. The longest phase of most migrations is not the technical work. It’s the internal alignment meeting that keeps getting rescheduled.
Define your success criteria. What does “migrated” mean for your business? Same functionality replicated? New capabilities activated? A specific timeline commitment? Write it down. One page is enough.
Output: a one-page migration brief that you can send to your new vendor to kick off the process.
Week 1: Vendor Selection and Kickoff Workshop
If you haven’t selected a new vendor yet, the evaluation framework in our previous guide applies. If you have, skip straight to the workshop.
The fastest migrations start with a one-day workshop. This is a single working session between your team and the new vendor, covering four workstreams in parallel.
Customer journey audit. Map the current receipt experience from the customer’s perspective. What works? What’s broken? What did customers complain about? What did your team wish the old system could do? This audit becomes the foundation for both the initial migration and the post-launch upgrade roadmap.
Claiming method design. How will customers receive their digital receipt going forward? QR code on a customer-facing display? QR on the printed receipt? Email capture at checkout? NFC tap? Loyalty app integration? The principle here is “match first”: replicate the claiming method customers are already used to before introducing new options. Changing the receipt delivery method and the vendor simultaneously creates unnecessary risk.
POS assessment. What POS systems are deployed across your stores? This is where the technical path gets determined. If the new vendor has a pre-built connector for your POS, integration takes days, not weeks. If your POS is uncommon or legacy, a printer-based bypass captures receipt data from the existing print stream without requiring any changes to POS software. It works with any system. If you want deeper integration with real-time data sync or loyalty hooks, expect custom API work, typically one to two weeks.
Here is the key point: the new vendor should handle the integration work. If they’re asking your IT team to build it, that’s a red flag. Your IT team provides access and is available for testing. Development is the vendor’s job.
Feature activation plan. What couldn’t the old vendor do that the new one can? Don’t activate everything on day one. But map the roadmap now: what goes live at launch, what comes in month two, what comes in month three. This prevents scope creep during migration while preserving the upgrade ambitions that motivated the switch.
Expect your new vendor to assign a dedicated transition manager who takes stock of all requirements and coordinates the implementation on their side. If they don’t offer this, you’ll be managing the project yourself, which adds weeks to the timeline and strain to your team.
Output: a migration plan document with timeline, responsibilities, technical requirements, and phased feature rollout.
Weeks 2-3: Technical Integration and Receipt Design
This is where the vendor does the heavy lifting. Your team provides inputs and access. The vendor executes.
POS integration is executed using the approach determined in the workshop. If pre-built connectors exist, this can be completed in days. If the printer-based approach is needed, it’s configured and tested against your specific receipt output. Your IT team grants access and participates in testing, not in development.
Receipt design runs in parallel. This means configuring the template with your branding, layout, content modules, and any compliance requirements. Fiscal regulations vary by market: some countries require specific legal text on receipts, specific formats, or specific identifiers. Your input is straightforward: brand assets, desired content blocks, and any legal must-haves for your markets. The vendor handles configuration.
Testing is where most teams underestimate the work. Test across store locations, device types, and edge cases. Split payments. Returns. Gift receipts. Multi-currency transactions if you operate across borders. Test on both iOS and Android. Test on the slow in-store WiFi that every retailer has in at least one location. The goal is to catch every edge case before a customer does.
Output: a fully configured, tested receipt experience ready for pilot.
Week 4: Staff Training and Pilot Launch
Store staff briefing is usually the fastest part of the entire migration. Receipt generation is automatic. Staff don’t need to learn a new system. What they need to know is two things: how to explain the change to a customer who asks (“We’ve upgraded our receipt system, same process for you”), and basic troubleshooting (“QR code not scanning? Check the display is powered on. Customer didn’t receive the email? Confirm the address.”). This takes minutes per store, not hours.
Launch your pilot in two to five stores. Pick a deliberate mix: one high-traffic flagship, one average-performing location, one store that had problems with the old system. If the migration works in the problem store, it will work everywhere. Run the pilot for at least five business days to capture a full week’s worth of patterns.
Monitor three things during the pilot: receipt scan and claim rates (are customers engaging at the same rate as before?), customer questions or complaints (is anything confusing about the new experience?), and any POS integration hiccups (edge cases the testing phase missed).
Refine based on what you find. Adjust receipt content if the layout isn’t working. Fix edge cases. Update staff guidance if a common question emerges. The pilot exists to catch problems at small scale before you roll out at full scale.
Output: a validated pilot with performance data to support full rollout.
Weeks 5-6: Full Rollout and Customer Communication
Roll out to all remaining stores. Depending on your store count and POS consistency, this can happen in waves (region by region) or simultaneously. Retailers with uniform POS environments across locations can often go live everywhere in a single push. Those with mixed systems benefit from a phased approach.
Customer communication during the transition should be minimal and positive. The framing is “upgrade,” never “our vendor failed.”
For in-store customers: brief signage or a note from staff if the change is visible. In most cases, it isn’t. If you’ve followed the “match first” principle, the receipt claiming method is identical and customers won’t notice.
For customers who had accounts or saved receipts on the old provider’s platform: a proactive message. “We’ve upgraded our digital receipt system. Your future receipts will be available through [new method]. Previous receipts stored on [old provider] may no longer be accessible through their platform.” Short, factual, forward-looking.
On the GDPR consent question: if customer consent was structured as consent to your brand (the retailer), it transfers to the new vendor because the data controller hasn’t changed. If consent was tied specifically to the old vendor’s platform, you may need to re-collect. This should have been determined during Week 1’s compliance review with your legal team. Don’t leave it until rollout.
Post-launch monitoring: for the first two weeks after full rollout, track claim rates against your pilot benchmarks. Address any store-specific issues quickly. Most will be minor: a display placement that doesn’t work in one location, a staff member who missed the briefing.
Output: a fully operational digital receipt system across all stores.
Match Then Upgrade: Why You Shouldn’t Redesign Everything on Day One
The instinct during a migration is to fix everything at once. New vendor, new receipt design, new customer journey, new features. Resist this.
The fastest, lowest-risk migrations follow a “match then upgrade” principle. First, replicate what you had so customers experience zero disruption. Then layer on new capabilities once the foundation is stable. Managing a migration and a redesign simultaneously is how timelines slip and teams burn out.
Phase 1 (go-live): Match the existing receipt experience. Same claiming method. Same basic content layout. The customer shouldn’t notice a disruption. Your team isn’t juggling two transformations at once.
Phase 2 (weeks 2-4 post-launch): Activate the first new capability. This is usually the biggest quick win: post-purchase marketing on the receipt itself. Coupons, product recommendations, feedback prompts, loyalty program onboarding. The features your old vendor couldn’t deliver or didn’t support.
Phase 3 (month 2-3): Expand to deeper capabilities. Customer segmentation from transaction data. Automated campaigns triggered by purchase behaviour. Wallet integration. Multi-store analytics and benchmarking.
This is how the real migrations have worked. Puma migrated from their previous digital receipt provider, Eyos, to refive. They went live with matched functionality first, then activated customer engagement features that weren’t available on the old platform. The migration didn’t just replace what they had. It opened a capability layer that wasn’t possible before.
The Austrian pharmacy chain completed a full migration in six weeks, including over the holiday period. They moved from a receipt-only tool to a customer engagement platform. The timeline was aggressive, but achievable precisely because they followed the match-first approach: receipts were live on the new system within weeks, and new features activated in phases after stabilisation.
You’re not replacing a receipt tool. You’re upgrading to a customer engagement platform.
What a Migration Actually Unlocks
Most retailers who switch digital receipt providers don’t end up with the same thing they had before. They end up with significantly more. That’s because the digital receipt market has split into two tiers: receipt-only tools and customer engagement platforms. If your previous provider was in the first category, migration puts you in the second.
What receipt-only tools do: generate and deliver a digital version of the paper receipt. Basic branding with your logo and colours. QR code or email delivery. Receipt storage for the customer. That’s it. The receipt is a document, not a channel.
What a customer engagement platform does (everything above, plus):
Anonymous customer identification. Customers scan a QR code and become a reachable contact without needing to download an app, create an account, or hand over an email address at the register. This addresses the biggest gap in physical retail: up to 80% of in-store customers leave without being identified. The receipt becomes the identification moment.
Post-purchase marketing on the receipt. The receipt becomes a communication channel. Personalised product recommendations, time-limited coupons, feedback prompts, event invitations. Receipt open rates consistently reach 75% or higher, compared to 20-25% for standard email marketing. You’re reaching customers at the moment of highest brand engagement: right after a purchase.
Loyalty program onboarding via the receipt. Instead of asking customers to sign up for a loyalty program at checkout, creating the friction that kills most in-store enrolment flows, the receipt itself becomes the onboarding moment. Scan the receipt, join the program. One action, not five.
Customer segmentation from transaction data. Every receipt generates structured purchase data: first-time versus returning customers, average basket value, product category preferences, purchase frequency. This data was always being generated. Most receipt-only tools just never made it actionable.
CRM and marketing automation integration. Receipt data flows into your existing CRM and campaign tools without manual export and import cycles. The receipt channel becomes part of your marketing stack, not a siloed system sitting next to it. When a customer claims a receipt and opts in, that data appears in your CRM in real time, ready for segmentation and campaign targeting.
Multi-store analytics. Compare receipt claim rates, customer engagement, and campaign performance across locations. Identify which stores are underperforming on customer capture and why. Benchmark store teams against each other and spot operational issues, such as a display that’s been moved or a claiming flow that isn’t working, before they affect results at scale.
If your previous provider was a receipt-only tool, the migration isn’t a lateral move. It’s a category upgrade. And if you were already asking your provider for features like these and not getting them, that’s the clearest signal that you outgrew the platform before it outgrew you.
Ready to Plan Your Migration?
If you’re planning a migration, or your provider has already shut down and you need to move fast, refive has run this process for retailers across Europe. We migrated Puma from their previous provider and onboarded an Austrian pharmacy chain in six weeks, including over the holiday period. Both started with matched functionality and upgraded to full customer engagement within months.
Book a migration assessment and we’ll map your specific timeline.
Read the evaluation guide | Explore the Retailer’s Guide to Digital Receipt Software →
Four to six weeks for most mid-market retailers with 20 to 100 stores. The timeline depends on POS complexity and how many stores need to be rolled out. Retailers with pre-built POS connectors available can move faster. The longest phase is usually the pilot and rollout, not the technical integration.
Under GDPR, you have the right to export your data from any provider. Request a full data export, including customer profiles, consent records, and transaction histories, immediately upon deciding to switch. Historical receipts stored on the old vendor’s infrastructure may not remain accessible after migration, especially if the vendor has shut down.
Yes. If you were a Warrify retail partner, your migration path depends on your POS system and how Warrify was integrated. Most retailers can transition to a new provider within four to six weeks. The critical first step is securing your data export before the platform’s systems go fully offline.
Prioritise data export immediately. Your customer data, consent records, and transaction history should be secured before the vendor’s systems go offline. Receipts hosted on the vendor’s infrastructure, such as web portals or cloud-hosted receipt viewers, may become inaccessible. Then follow the migration timeline in this guide.
No. Modern digital receipt platforms integrate with your existing POS through pre-built connectors or a printer-based bypass. The printer-based approach works with any POS, including legacy systems, by capturing receipt data from the existing print stream. No POS replacement is required.
If managed well, the transition is smooth. The “match then upgrade” approach ensures customers experience the same receipt flow on day one. New features are activated gradually after the system is stable. The only visible change should be an improvement, not a disruption.
