With Gmail, it is easy to set up filters that will automatically forward certain email messages to another address based on rules that you set. This can be helpful for use with Shoeboxed, as you can train your Gmail account to forward email receipts to Shoeboxed, where they can be better organized into categories, generate statistics, and be integrated with your paper receipts.

I went through and created what is hopefully a handy guide to help you set up filtering on your Gmail account. If you don’t have a Gmail account, but you want one, you can sign up for free at www.gmail.com. Let’s get started!

1. In your account, click on “Settings” in the top right corner.
2. Click on “Filters” tab and then click “Create a new filter”
3. Here is where Gmail asks you to set up rules for which emails it should automatically forward to Shoeboxed. I played around with this for a little bit using their “Test Search” feature, but I had pretty good success with putting “receipt” OR “purchase in the Subject field and revolution OR alert OR “You Have a New” in the “Doesn’t have” field. This makes it so that anything with the words receipt or purchase in the subject line will be forwarded on. The words that I chose for the “Doesn’t have” category rule out blog updates (because our blog is called Receipt Revolution), Google Alerts that I get for receipt-related info, and of course, notifications from Shoeboxed that I get when I have new receipts.
4. Click “Next Step” and you’ll be taken to a page with more settings. Click the checkbox “Forward it to:” and enter in your Shoeboxed email address (yourusername@shoeboxed.com) and click “Create Filter”. If you want to send in all your past email receipts, also check the box “Also apply filter to ## conversations below.”
   
5. Wait and watch the email receipts come into your Shoeboxed account!
   

I’ve been using Receipt Mail-In since we first started offering it. I have over a thousand receipts in my own account now, as I send in about 50 every month to be scanned and uploaded.

With all these paper receipts in my account, it’s certainly cool to watch my statistics grow and evolve over time. For some reason, though, with all the paper receipts I got to play around with, I realized that I hadn’t really be shopping online all that much recently.

So then I thought: might as well make an impulse buy. And to Amazon I went. I bought a couple of books and gave them my Shoeboxed email address. They came right into my account, right along with all my paper receipts. Voila!

This was the original feature of Shoeboxed when we launched our website last summer, but it’s still my favorite.

So remember, every time you buy something online, tell the store that your email is address is your username @shoeboxed.com. The receipts that they send you will come right into your Shoeboxed account. Follow up emails that they attempt to send you at your Shoeboxed email address, will be separated out from your receipts in Your Shopping Inbox inside your Shoeboxed acccount.

Old email receipts that you are hiding in your email client can be forwarded to your Shoeboxed account as well. Though it may be kind of a pain to search for all those old receipts in your cluttered inbox, just think: This is the last time you’ll ever have to do it, because Shoeboxed will organize them for you.

David Allen is a widely popular author who preaches the concept of GTD, or Getting Things Done. He is a thought leader in the area of personal productivity, and I’ve been meaning to mention him and his suggestions on the blog for awhile now. For a limited time, we are offering to send you a FREE David Allen book! If you buy a membership to our Receipt Mail-In program for $9, we will send you a free copy of David Allen’s book, “Getting Things Done.”

Here are some of the core principles, as noted on his website:

* Capturing anything and everything that has your attention
* Defining actionable things discretely into outcomes and concrete next steps
* Organizing reminders and information in the most streamlined way, in appropriate categories, based on
how and when you need to access them
* Keeping current and “on your game” with appropriately frequent reviews of the six horizons of your
commitments (purpose, vision, goals, areas of focus, projects, and actions)

He also has some interesting things to say about receipts:

If your receipts are all over the place, your filing system is chaotic, and your in-basket is dysfunctional, it just seems like too much work to do to find and organize the tasks at hand.

And

We’ll probably want to claim deductions, but if we do we’ll have to back them up, and that means we’ll need all the receipts. Oh, my God! I don’t know if we really have all the receipts we’d need and what if we didn’t have all the receipts but we claimed the deductions anyway and we got audited? Audited? Oh, no - the IRS’s JAIL!!

Anyway, Shoeboxed is not just about getting your receipts organized and manageable. We’re big supporters of any life hacks out there that can help you get other parts of your life more organized or make you more productive.

And that’s why we have the new offer: If you buy a membership to our Receipt Mail-In program for $9, we will send you a free copy of David Allen’s book, “Getting Things Done.”

Update: Oct. 14, 2008 — Offer expired, and dead links removed.

So today is Cyber Monday, according to Shop.org. This is the biggest day of the year for online shopping. And as a platform that exists to help you in organizing your online and offline receipts, we’re obviously excited.

Well, actually, as much as we like online shopping, we are not necessarily fond of every holiday neologism that is being made up by the industry. I’m thinking back to an old episode of The Simpsons, where they create a new holiday called Love Day just to drive up sales of terrible merchandise.

The term “Cyber-Monday” was coined in 2005, when ComScore reported that online spending increased by 26% on the first Monday after Thanksgiving, compared to the year before.

There may be a lot of reasons for this (one for sure is that online spending is simply increasing by two-digit percent numbers every year, no matter what day it is) but the whole reason it was given such a moniker makes it seem like just another marketing stunt.

With things like Valentine’s or Mother’s day, which are also heavily pushed by businesses, we at least have something (or someone) to care for on these days. Yes Valentine’s Day is commercial but we’re willing to accept it because it’s also about love and family affection. Cyber Monday is different. It seems like it’s a cold, impersonal online shopping day. And there aren’t any holiday decorations.

Nevertheless, we love deals. And a lot of stores use this new holiday to bring you some of those. So, while keeping the criticism about useless marketing buzzwords up, we will happily enjoy getting a good bargain.

If you’re like us, you can get the best overview of what stores offer what kind of discount, here .

We hope you get a good deal and wish you a good week!

Deals, deals, deals. As of yesterday, they are officially all over the place. And they’ll be everywhere throughout the holiday season shopping rush. Whether you go out with the family to your local mall and spend the entire day there, or if you decide to stay at home and take advantage of the many online store deals, it’s a pretty fun time of year.

Use your Shoeboxed email address to buy online and scan or upload images of the paper receipts you get in stores this season. Not only will all your receipts be quickly organized, but you will also be able to share your newest acquisitions with other shoppers looking for inspiration.

Here are a few tips for a great holiday shopping season:

1. Check online deals. People too often overlook the deals made available by online stores and just head off to the mall. Be sure to go online and search for items you are interested in buying. You may find some very attractive deals.

2. If you go out to shop, check store opening times and try to go as early as possible to be sure that you will get the items you want at the price they were advertised for. The great deals usually run out quickly on Black Friday, but it’s also true for the rest of the holiday season at many stores.

3. Check the newspaper! Some great deals are revealed only in the newspaper, can be missed if you’re not looking.

4. Solicit the help of friends! Getting a recommendation from another shopper is invaluable. Sift through all the ads, and actually get want you want this shopping season.

5. Check out our favorite stores here to get a glimpse into the wackiest, most useful, and most entertaining stores on the web.

This week is one of the most exciting times of the year for shopping. Unfortunately, it can also be a very disorganized and frantic time. Make sure you shop online with your Shoeboxed email address and organize all your receipts on your free Shoeboxed account!

Wassup shoeboxed,

We are taking the site down for a few hours this afternoon because we are putting up a new version later tonight. There are lots of upgrades coming related to receipt organization, our bread and butter. We’ll also throw some really fun new features your way that you might not expect, but we think you’ll love ‘em as much as we do. Be prepared to finally see the secret we’ve been barely able to keep for the last few months.

Receipts and e-mails are still coming in and being processed while the site is down. If you need to access that information while this maintenance is going on, send an e-mail to help@team.shoeboxed.com, and we will get that info to you manually.

The new Shoeboxed is the best thing since bread… sliced or otherwise. Yeah, I said it.

Updates to come.

When Taylor was convincing me to join the Shoeboxed team back in February, he talked about changing online shopping, about improving online security, and about making people think differently about how they can use the Internet.

Bold statements, for sure, especially when made in a college dorm room. But Taylor has had a really detailed plan for how to actually reach these goals since the beginning, and we’ve been tackling this project in phases. The first step for Shoeboxed was to become the leading online tool for receipt organization. The incredible success and support we’ve seen in this area is really promising for what’s coming next. Several of the most well-read blogs on the Internet have written about us, and we’ve exceeded pretty much every expectation we have had for growth. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, but Shoeboxed is so much more than receipts, and we’re getting ready to unveil the newest part of the Shoeboxed Idea.

So what is it? Where is Shoeboxed going?

Well I’m about ready to pee my pants about what’s coming next. We’ll be building off of our receipt organizer, and making Shoeboxed useful in a new kind of way. Instead of just being about organization and security, Shoeboxed will soon be able to more closely mirror the real-world shopping experience. The size of the Shoeboxed community is certainly unbelievable, and we are so excited to be a more engaging, personalized, and fun service for anyone who’s ever made a purchase… ever.

Keep checking back for the new stuff, and get excited for a fresh new look too!

I’ll be honest, I’m not the most enthusiastic shopper. I don’t like going to the mall. Once I find a shirt I like, I will purchase one in each color and two in black to extend the time in between shopping trips.

But if there’s one thing I always fall for, it’s customized products. An iPod with my quote on the side? I’ll take it. A track suit with “Alex” printed on the derriere? Yep. A cubic zirconia mouth grill that says “Brazil”? Hello! Make it two.

This is why I had a small heart attack when the German company Dein Design gave the Shoeboxed team spiffy laptop skins with the Shoeboxed logo (you can see mine in the picture). The skins don’t just rock, they also protect your computer from scratches so it will always look like new.

How Dein Design actually gets the skins for laptops, iPods, or IKEA tables to apply without any bubbles is completely beyond me (something to do with the honeycomb design- yeah, no idea). How the skins can be removed without damaging my computer so I can replace them with other skins is also a mystery.

All I know is that it’s cool, individual, and available online. Which means I can buy it without setting foot in a mall and store my receipt safely at shoeboxed.com. I’ll take two, please!

So what are you supposed to do if you love Shoeboxed–the team, the spirit, the innovation, the product–but you just don’t feel like you shop online enough to benefit from signing up?

We think you should think again! Shoeboxed is totally worth it, even if you only buy things online a couple times a year.

I can say this with certainty because I am the same way; in fact, I don’t buy things in general unless I have to, and sometimes I don’t buy things even when I know I should (you can see the picture of my shoes in the blog archives for an example of this).

Anyway, a few days ago I remembered that my time in Berlin is drawing to a close, and that I actually need to start getting ready to go back to the good old U.S. of A. I quickly realized that I had absolutely no idea when my return flight was leaving, or even on which day the flight departed, and that it would probably be in my best interests to find that information out. Of course, my travel itinerary was nowhere to be found. However, I knew the airline had sent a copy of the flight information with my e-ticket receipt to my e-mail address. This was not exactly reassuring, though, since that e-mail was a few months old, and finding one e-mail in my inbox is like finding one specific needle in a haystack made out of other needles.

Long story short, I searched through my inbox for what felt like a really long time, and ended up asking my mom to send me her copy of my itinerary. She was not impressed.

Obviously, none of this would have happened if I had been using Shoeboxed when I bought the ticket—my e-ticket information would have been easily accessible right from the start. This experience made me realize that it doesn’t matter how often you shop online - Shoeboxed is a great tool for anyone to have.

In my 21 years of life, I’ve bought ONE t-shirt from J.Crew online, but in the last two weeks, I’ve received the following e-mails from their online store:

Last Chance for free shipping
Presenting… free shipping
New at Crewcuts… Seaside Chic
Hello sale…
New men’s must-have: the cardigan

Let’s recap why this is annoying. First of all, I don’t need a cardigan, and neither do the rest of you guys out there. Second of all, I’m in Germany, and J. Crew doesn’t even ship here, so I couldn’t care less what their non-existent shipping costs. Third, CrewCuts is the children’s clothing line at J.Crew, and unless there’s something I don’t know about, I’m not buying baby clothes for a while. Though I do like J. Crew otherwise, I hate getting all these irrelevant e-mails in my inbox.

But now that Shoeboxed is up and running, I went to jcrew.com and modified my account settings. In about 20 seconds, I changed the e-mail associated with my account to my @shoeboxed.com address. Now all these store notifications come into my Shoeboxed account. I also one-click-unsubscribed from J.Crew e-mails, causing them to only show up in my Shoeboxed account, and to stay away from my personal inbox.

I still like J. Crew, and I still get those e-mails in my Shoeboxed account, but now I don’t have to have them in my inbox, where all my important personal communications are. My personal inbox is breathing easier, and so am I.

I also did this for all the other stores where I shop (and the stores that send me e-mails even though I don’t buy stuff from them) and changed out my e-mail address.

So now, whenever I’m in the mood to shop, I just go to my Shoeboxed account, see all my new e-mails, check out all the places that are having sales or recommending new products, and start shopping from there.

When it comes to online shopping, I’ve realized that my mom isn’t really seeing the whole picture. Sure, she’s learned to order her running shoes online so that she can save money. We’ve set up online banking so that she can easily pay all of the bills electronically, saving paper and minimizing piles on the kitchen counter. She even knows that there’s a way to download music with something called “iTunes” that somehow can get on your “iPod”. Yes, she uses air quotes.

But I don’t think she realizes all of the ways that the internet can improve her day-to-day life. If she needs to find research for a paper she’s writing on childhood development, even the local librarian is going to recommend Google Scholar as a starting point. If she needs a detailed map from St. Louis to Durham, it’s always faster to use Mapquest or Google Maps. If she misses the finale of her favorite show, she should know that they are often available for free on the network’s website.

So it’s time I step in. I can’t say that I understand what moms out there want. And I certainly don’t claim to understand how my mom thinks — AT ALL. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the point. No one has ever taken the time to tell my mom what she should know about the internet — how it can make her life easier. The more time I spend working at Shoeboxed, the more I feel compelled to help my mom see what she’s missing.

So if you want to use the internet—if you want to know how it can make your life easier, here are a few sites that you might want to check out:

Amazingmail.com. Let’s start with the basics. Who doesn’t like to show off the cool places they have visited? Now you can do it easily and cheaply. Upload your digital photos to the computer (the camera should come with instructions…) and make a postcard that you can send to friends. It’s a great alternative to the yearly Christmas card, and the product always looks great. Then check out Ofoto.com where you can print your favorites.

Keycode.com and HotCoupons.com. You might want to sit down for this one. There are online sites that specialize in coupons! Many of the sites offer deals for specific retailers that can’t be found in the weekend newspaper. And don’t think that you can’t find local deals—you can enter your city’s name and “local coupons” into Google and find printable bar codes for your favorite shops.

Iexplore.com. You know something’s good when it’s affiliated with National Geographic. If you want to go on an exciting vacation but don’t have any time to plan it, you should check out this site. It has travel and activity guides for every inch of the globe, with advice on how to get the most out of your vacation. Whether you’re looking to climb a mountain or go sailing, Iexplore can make the appropriate recommendation (based on your experience and the trip’s level of difficulty). It will even recommend pre-screened travel and gear packages.

Rottentomatoes.com. When you’re in the mood for a romantic comedy, do you really trust the opinion of Roger Ebert, Richard Roepert, or Gene Shallot? Of course not. This is a democracy, people—when I’m choosing a movie, I want to hear the opinion of all the qualified critics and film gurus. Next time you’re heading to the cinema, check out rottentomatoes.com. The “Tomatometer” is the most trusted scale when it comes to finding the freshest movie. On a scale from one to ten, anything over a seven is a safe bet.

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When you think about it, online shopping is a pretty new development. Just a few short years ago, even the most internet-savvy consumer would have been hesitant about buying anything other than a computer online. We all love to be able to thoroughly inspect things before we buy them (granted, half the time we have absolutely no idea what we’re looking at), so the concept of buying something that you can’t see or touch was a little disconcerting. However, times are changing, and people are now buying more than just electronics online; buying travel tickets and booking hotels online have become commonplace, and last year apparel and accessories beat out computer hardware and software as the top non-travel markets in online retail. In fact, online apparel sales went up 61% in 2005 to a total of $18.3 billion dollars — almost double the total from 2003.

A large part of the increase in popularity of online shopping is due to the fact that people have access to more detailed information regarding various products online. Five years ago, you were lucky if you could see more than one picture of the shoes you were thinking of buying, and chances are those pictures took about half an hour to load. Now, many retailers offer full photo albums for each product, and some even have movies of the product being displayed.

Even with all this progress and growth, though, the Internet still only accounts for about 7% of total retail sales, and research has shown that the meteoric growth of online retail may already be starting to slow. According to Forrester Research, much of the online retail industry’s money goes into minimizing glitches in the transaction process, rather than into the creativity or innovation. It’s time for a change—the online shopping industry has seen some incredible growth in the past few years, but it is going to take some cool new ideas to help make it a truly powerful presence in the retail world. Whatever those ideas may be, Shoeboxed plans to be there all the way, organizing that ever-growing pile of digital receipts. And it’s only just the beginning

The 4th of July has come and gone, and we all know what that means — summer is half-over. It’s always at this point in the year when I realize how much I need to start appreciating the benefits of warm weather, time with friends and family, and extra hours of sunlight. But the holiday weekend signals one more important transition — it’s time to start thinking about back-to-school shopping! What color binders are “in” this year? Which pen has the most comfortable grip? Which books do I really need to buy to pass this class? All valid questions.

For most of my life, buying school supplies required making a trip to Target or Office Max with my list. Even at college, I went to the local book store to pick out my textbooks. That is, until I realized I was getting ripped off. But back-to-school shopping isn’t what it used to be. Last year, more than twenty percent of pre-college shopping was done online. This is significant increase from even three years ago when I was a freshman entering college.

As I mentioned in a previous blog entitled, “Technology Takes Online Shopping to the Top”, retailers are incorporating photos, videos, and even audio into interactive and flashy platforms — all to help consumers make more informed decisions and purchases. Websites that feature binders, notebooks, bedding, textbooks, or cheap college furniture now have dynamic product pictures that help make the shopping process fun, personal, and reliable. You know exactly what you are getting because you can look at it from all angles, in all colors and sizes.

According to recent articles, there may also be a benefit to keeping track of the receipts from your back-to-school shopping sprees. The Minnesota Department of Revenue, for instance, has encouraged parents to hold on to their school supplies receipts. Many of these items can help qualify Minnesota residents for a tax credit or subtraction on their Minnesota income tax return. Some of the eligible expenses include:

Textbooks that are used in public school grades K-12: paper, pens, pencils, notebooks, rulers, and special supplies needed for shop, family consumer science and art classes, and up to $200 of computer hardware or educational software.

It’s just another example of how online shopping is becoming increasingly integrated into our everyday lives. At this point, very few people make all of their purchases on the internet — but it won’t be long before it becomes a significant part of our lives. Do yourself a favor and check out shoeboxed.com so you can start getting organized today.

According to a study completed within the last year, purchases made by women accounted for more than eighty-five percent of all consumer expenditures. Yes, it’s hard to believe, but women shop more than men. But the real question is why? The answer may surprise you.

Research conducted by Cotton Incorporated Lifestyle Monitor™ confirmed that women spend more time than men shopping each month. Females who responded to the survey admitted to spending an average 100 minutes a month shopping for apparel, while males claimed they spent an average 60 minutes doing the same. Shopping psychologists have often suggested that although many men enjoy shopping, most do not want to be perceived as caring about their wardrobe—and therefore spend less time at the mall.

But this theory may not be entirely valid. Although women were proven to shop more often than men, they also shopped more times in a given month. Men were likely to shop an average 1.4 times a month and women made 2.3 trips per month. What does this mean? Both sexes spend about forty minutes per shopping trip.

Still, psychologists assert that shopping is a great “stress buster” for women. According to the survey, female respondents often get some sort of thrill or excitement from buying. More than fifty percent said they “like” or “love” shopping. Whether going to the mall with friends on the weekend or doing family shopping during the holiday season, one thing’s for sure—men may enjoy buying, but women love shopping.

Consumers have always been hesitant to buy clothes online that they can’t try on or see in person. But in recent months, online apparel sales have continued to grow at a rapid rate — outpacing even the online computer and software industries.

This isn’t all that surprising. I certainly buy more things online than I did three years ago. But I can’t say that I am any more comfortable with the idea of buying apparel online today — after all, I still have to take a leap of faith when deciding to purchase something that I’ve never actually seen. So what’s driving the trend? Rapidly evolving technology is making online shopping more and more appealing.

In the past, retailers had to focus on making secure shopping sites that worked, and the shopping experience remained limited to photos and simple product descriptions. These days, technology incorporates photos, videos, and even audio into interactive and flashy platforms — all of which look to reduce the information asymmetry between buyer and seller and better convey a company’s brand and culture. Virtual runways, online showrooms, and dynamic product pictures help make the shopping process fun, personal, and reliable.
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