Receipt Validation Fundamentals

Brands running rewards promotions need to determine whether a submitted receipt satisfies their campaign criteria. Taggun evaluates each submission against your configured rules — such as qualifying line items, purchase dates, merchants, and balance owing — and returns the documented validation result with passed and failed checks in the same HTTP response.

Example: a beverage company runs a promotion where customers who purchase two qualifying products from any U.S. retailer are entered into a prize draw. Every entry requires validating that the customer's receipt actually includes the qualifying products.

Availability

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Availability: Receipt validation is included on the Advanced plan and above. Enable Campaign Validation in your account Feature Settings when it is available on your plan. See Plans & Feature Access.

The Campaign Validation Process

1. Document upload — customers upload a supported receipt or invoice through your campaign interface.
2. Data extraction — Taggun extracts the fields used by the configured campaign rules.
3. Rule evaluation — Taggun evaluates the configured date, merchant-name, product-code, product-line-item, balance-owing, and SmartValidate rules.
4. Fraud signals, when configured — enabled similarity and tamper controls can affect validation; enabled digital detection can return a detection signal. Not every returned fraud signal becomes a passedValidations or failedValidations key.
5. Validation result — successful, passedValidations, and failedValidations return in the synchronous response.
6. Reward, reject, or review — your application decides the customer outcome.

Key Challenges in Receipt Validation

1. Brand and product identification variability

Brands and products are described inconsistently across sales channels — varied point-of-sale systems, e-commerce formats, and naming conventions. In a cola promotion spanning retail and D2C channels, qualifying entries might appear as:

• "COCA-COLA 330ML" (airport kiosk)
• "Coke Classic" (local convenience store)
• "CC Diet 6pk" (supermarket)
• "Coca-Cola Zero Sugar" (D2C website)

This variability makes it hard to accurately identify qualifying products across all purchase points.

2. Fraud detection and prevention

Rewards promotions attract fraud. Common patterns include:

• Duplicate submissions of the same receipt
• Digitally altered receipts (for example, edited with photo software)
• Fake or fabricated receipts and order confirmations
• Receipts from outside the promotion period

Catching these while keeping the experience smooth for genuine customers is essential to campaign integrity.

3. Inflexible criteria and slow results

Systems that can't express complex criteria limit what brands can offer, and validation that isn't real-time makes customers wait to learn whether they've earned a reward — the promotion loses its immediacy.

How Taggun Addresses These Challenges

Tackling brand, product, and store name variability

1. Context-aware AI — Taggun's models understand brand and product descriptions across formats, recognising variations, abbreviations, and misspellings.
2. Campaign rule lists — supply expected merchant names, product codes, and product line-item names in your campaign settings, and Taggun checks submissions against them.

Robust fraud detection

Fraud detection can run in the validation flow through duplicate/similarity, tamper, and digital-receipt checks. These signals help you identify suspicious submissions; they do not guarantee that every accepted purchase is genuine. See Fraud Detection Overview.

Narrow custom yes/no criteria

SmartValidate adds a prompt-based rule when a campaign needs one receipt-visible yes/no check that the structured fields do not cover. A generic example is checking whether the receipt shows payment by credit card. Use the structured campaign fields when they already represent the requirement.

What's In Scope — and What's Yours

Taggun evaluates the configured campaign rules and returns the result: pass/fail plus the specific checks that passed or failed. This result is not universal proof that a purchase or document is genuine. Your systems own everything either side of that:

• Taggun provides: extraction, rule checking, fraud signals, and a synchronous validation response you can act on.
• You provide: the customer-facing submission front end, all end-user messaging (approved/rejected notifications), and the downstream reward workflow.

This split means Taggun drops into your existing campaign stack — your branding and communications stay entirely under your control.

Next Steps

1. Setting Up Validation Campaigns — the workflow and core concepts.
2. Campaign Settings Reference — every rule you can define.
3. Validating Receipts — submitting receipts and reading results.

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Beyond promotions

Taggun's documented validation workflow is designed for promotions. For other validation use cases, contact [email protected] to discuss current support.

Need something not covered here? Contact [email protected] — see Contacting Support.