A home-appliance brand was losing millions a year to fraudulent warranty claims, with paper cards registered by barely one customer in seven. A scan-to-register flow changed the economics.
Hauswerk Appliances, a mid-sized German manufacturer of small kitchen and home appliances, was paying for warranties it never issued. Fraudulent and improper claims were inflating warranty costs, while genuine customers rarely registered their products — leaving the company with little idea of who actually owned its appliances.
After replacing paper warranty cards with a scan-to-register system built on unit-level QR codes, Hauswerk cut warranty fraud by an estimated 71%, lifted registration from roughly one buyer in seven to 68%, and shortened average claim resolution from over a week to 2.4 days. Just as valuable, it gained first-party data on about three times as many customers.
This analysis looks at how that change happened, and what other manufacturers can take from it.
Hauswerk (an illustrative composite) sells coffee machines, cordless vacuums, and small kitchen appliances across the EU. Annual revenue sits in the mid-hundreds of millions of euros, with products reaching customers through electronics retailers, online marketplaces, regional distributors, and a modest direct channel.
That mix is efficient for selling but poor for visibility. Once a unit left the warehouse, Hauswerk usually had no idea who bought it, where, or when — until something went wrong and a warranty claim arrived.
Two problems compounded each other.
First, warranty costs were rising faster than sales, and a large share looked questionable. Claims came in for units outside their coverage window, for products bought on the grey market, and occasionally for serial numbers that appeared more than once. With warranty provisions running close to 2% of sales, even a modest fraction of improper claims added up to a seven-figure annual leak.
Second, the company couldn’t separate genuine claims from dubious ones quickly, because it had almost no record of the original sale. Proof of purchase rested entirely with the customer — a receipt they often couldn’t find.
The operational cost was just as real. Every contested claim meant back-and-forth with the customer, manual checks, and a support team spending hours adjudicating cases on thin evidence. Resolution routinely took more than a week, which frustrated honest customers most of all.
Hauswerk had the usual defences. None held up.
Paper warranty cards were returned by only about 14% of buyers. The rest of the customer base was invisible.
Manual verification depended on receipts and human judgement. Receipts fade, get lost, or get reused; judgement varied from one agent to the next.
Serial-number checks confirmed that a serial existed, but not who owned it or when it sold — so they couldn’t catch a duplicate or an out-of-window claim.
Call-centre and dealer validation added time without adding certainty. Dealers had little incentive to flag a claim, and agents had nothing authoritative to check against.
The common thread: every method tried to verify a claim after the fact, using evidence the company didn’t control.
Hauswerk replaced the paper card with a unique QR code on each unit and its packaging, linked to a digital warranty record. The approach was deliberately incremental.
The team piloted two product lines first — a coffee machine and a cordless vacuum — before extending across the catalogue. Each code was unique to a single unit and tied to its serial number, so one scan did three things at once: confirmed the product was genuine, registered the warranty against that exact unit, and created an owner record.
Registration happened at the moment of unboxing. The customer scanned, landed on a branded page, and confirmed coverage in a few taps — no app, no account, no card to post. To make the trade obvious, Hauswerk offered a short coverage extension to anyone who registered, which gave customers a concrete reason to scan.
Behind the scenes, the platform — Traciqo — logged each scan with basic context and gave the warranty team a single view of which unit was sold, when it was registered, and how often its code had been scanned. Claims could now be checked against an authoritative record instead of a customer’s receipt.
Implementation was less disruptive than expected. Codes were added during existing packaging runs, and the pilot ran for a quarter before the full rollout — long enough to refine the registration page and the incentive before scaling.
Within the first year of full rollout, Hauswerk reported:
The fraud and registration numbers matter most, but the team noted a quieter benefit: honest customers got faster, less adversarial service, which showed up as fewer escalations.
Several lessons generalise well beyond appliances.
Capture the customer at unboxing, not by mail. Registration works when it’s a few taps at the moment of excitement, and fails when it’s a card to post later.
Make the incentive immediate. A small, instant benefit did more for registration than any reminder campaign.
Verify against records you own. Receipts and serial checks put the burden on the customer and the evidence outside your control. A unit-level record flips both.
Treat the data as a by-product, not the goal. Hauswerk set out to reduce fraud; the customer dataset it gained proved just as useful for service and retention.
Roll out in stages. A single-line pilot surfaced the practical issues — code placement, page wording, incentive size — cheaply, before they could scale into expensive ones.
The instructive part of Hauswerk’s experience isn’t the technology; QR codes and digital warranties are unremarkable on their own. It’s the shift in where proof lives. As long as authenticity and ownership depended on a customer keeping a receipt, the company was always reacting — paying for claims it couldn’t dispute and guessing at a market it couldn’t see.
Tying each product to a record the manufacturer controls changed that balance. Warranty stopped being a cost centre built on weak evidence and became a source of trust and data. For any brand selling through channels it doesn’t fully control, that is the more durable lesson: you can’t protect what you can’t verify, and you can’t build a relationship with a customer you never meet.
Authentication, digital warranty, and dynamic QR — in one platform.
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