SEATTLE NEWS ARCHIVES & FEATURES
Paying for Starbucks with your phone
Oct 26, 2010, 1:21 PM | Updated: Mar 28, 2011, 3:46 pm
Starbucks expects to have more than $1 billion loaded onto Starbucks mobile payment cards this year.
Seattle was a test market for the mobile payments, and now the company is expanding it to about 300 of its shops in New York and other East Coast cities.
Customers are able to pay for their orders after they downloading a free Starbucks Card Mobile app on their BlackBerry smartphone, iPhone or iPod Touch. They will have to create an account and keep it loaded with a credit card. Then, when buying an item the customer holds the phone in front of them so that the cashier can scan the barcode that is on the screen.
The concept has already been tested in 16 stores in Seattle and Northern California and at more than 1,000 Starbucks in Target stores.
Android phones don’t support the free Starbucks app, but the company isn’t too concerned about that. They say more than 71 percent of its users use either BlackBerries or iPhones.
