The Takeaway: Receipt-only data creates an incomplete and biased view of inflation due to self-selection, biased reporting, poor product detail, lag, and misaligned incentives. Discover how the OpenBrand Consumer Price Index uses a comprehensive mosaic of price observations that better captures what consumers are seeing on the shelf, what they see on discount, and what they actually pay for.

In a world where prices can change at the tap of a screen, measuring inflation accurately is both more difficult and more critical than ever. As economists and data scientists seek better tools, one approach that often attracts attention is the consumer receipt panel: a dataset built from shopper-submitted receipts, either photographed with an app or uploaded manually.

While receipt panels can provide useful insights into consumer behavior, building a consumer price index (CPI) based only on receipt-panel data introduces a series of structural weaknesses. These flaws aren’t always obvious, but they have real consequences for anyone relying on the index—policymakers, businesses, forecasters, or households trying to make sense of, and decisions on, their economic landscape.

At OpenBrand, we designed the OpenBrand Consumer Price Index with these limitations squarely in mind. Our CPI is built on a mosaic of data that captures what prices consumers see on the shelf, what they see on discount, and what they actually pay for. This mosaic approach helps insulate the OpenBrand Consumer Price Index from the weaknesses that sole reliance upon receipt-panel data can bring.

Let me explain.

1. Representativeness Problem in Receipt Panels

When a CPI relies only on receipt uploads, the index is built on the behaviors of people who:

• Take the time to photograph receipts
• Participate in incentive programs
• Shop at stores that provide itemized paper or digital receipts
• Shop for specific items incentivized by receipt panel collectors
• Are comfortable sharing data with an app

That’s not a representative snapshot of the U.S. consumer. It’s a convenience sample, useful for some analyses, but not for a core inflation indicator.

Why OpenBrand’s CPI is immune:
The OpenBrand CPI uses a broad data set drawn from prices observed on millions of products on store shelves, online, on discount, on receipts, and from the longest-running consumer durables survey in the United States. This ensures representation across income groups, regions, retailer types, and product categories, without relying on a self-selected, opt-in behavior.

2. Receipt Panels Capture What’s Scanned vs What Consumers Actually Buy

Consumers often fail to upload receipts for:

• Small purchases
• Routine purchases
• Purchases split across payment methods
• Online orders where the receipt is buried in email

This creates erratic sampling frequency and inconsistent product coverage.

Why OpenBrand’s CPI is immune:
The OpenBrand CPI is based on a dataset of exhaustive price observations, not voluntary uploads. That means we capture the full pattern of consumer spending, including the mundane and the automatic—the things households rarely document but always pay for such as personal care products – toothpaste, hair care, toiletries, etc.

3. Product-Detail Gap in Receipt-Based Inflation Measures

Even when receipts are uploaded, they often list abbreviated product codes or generic descriptions—“LGE MILK,” “SHAMPOO,” “SERV CHG”—with no SKU, UPC, or version detail. 

That makes:

• Product matching difficult or limited
• Quality adjustments nearly impossible
• Substitution tracking unreliable
• New-product introduction invisible

Receipt-only CPIs can confuse a price change with a product change.

Why OpenBrand’s CPI is immune:
OpenBrand uses structured product-level data, including SKU and UPC detail, manufacturing codes, and metadata. That lets us track true product equivalence, properly adjust for new product variation, and separate real inflation from quality-driven price shifts.

4. Receipt-Only CPI Approaches Struggle With Timeliness

Even the best receipt panels suffer from lag:

• Purchase date on receipts may not easily be tracked
• Consumers delay uploads
• Apps batch receipts
• Processing pipelines take time

For an inflation indicator, this latency can be a major drawback, especially during volatile periods.

Why OpenBrand’s CPI is immune:
The OpenBrand CPI is built on near-real-time price observation data, updating quickly enough to reflect active price dynamics, promotions, and category-specific shifts as they happen. With the OpenBrand in-store and online optical collection methods, spacing between same-SKU price observations is consistently a matter of days, not months. This allows a timely and true apples-to-apples comparison of price changes.

5. Incentive-Driven Distortions in Receipt Upload Behavior

To maintain participation, many receipt apps offer:

• Cashback
• Points
• Sweepstakes entries
• Fraud

These incentives often encourage users to upload certain types of receipts (e.g., grocery) while ignoring others, skewing the sample further, while also incentivizing nefarious behavior such as submission of fraudulent receipts.

Why OpenBrand’s CPI is immune:
Our CPI is predominantly driven by our dense pricing database that doesn’t rely on incentivizing consumer uploads to collect data. The OpenBrand CPI is grounded in naturally occurring price observation, free of incentive-driven distortions.

A Modern, Comprehensive Approach to Inflation Measurement

Receipt panels offer valuable micro-insights into consumer shopping behavior. But a receipt-panel-only CPI is not an inflation measure you want when setting pricing strategy, steering monetary policy, forecasting business cycles. The structural limitations – self-selection, biased reporting, poor product detail, lag, and misaligned incentives – are baked into the methodology of a CPI that relies solely on a receipt-panel-only data set. No amount of statistical modeling can fully remove them.

The OpenBrand Consumer Price Index was designed to overcome these limitations from day one. By grounding inflation measurement on a comprehensive mosaic of data gathered across merchants, channels, categories, and product types, we deliver a CPI that is more accurate, more representative, more granular, and more timely than any index built solely on consumer receipts.

Inflation is too important to measure with partial visibility. With OpenBrand, we measure it the way households actually live it.