Starbucks will allow British coffee drinkers to pay for their drink with their iPhone using a dedicated mobile app. Contactless NFC-enabled payments are cool, but the coffee store chain doesn’t have time to wait for the technology to become mainstream — they want to enable the capability now.
“There’s no doubt that mobile payments are going to be the future of shopping, but it’s not clear how it’s going to develop,” said Brian Waring, VP of marketing and category for Starbucks UK. “We just didn’t want to wait. Ours is so simple and it enhances the whole experience for customers.”
He added that customers will be shaving 10 seconds off the transaction time by using the app. That may doesn’t sound much, but we applaud them [Starbucks] for taking the initiative to further improve the coffee ordering across its stores.
Using the free to download application, customers with registered Starbucks Reward Cards will be able to make purchases in all 700 Starbucks stores across the UK beginning in January. The Android app is also in development and will be released at some point next year.
Earlier this year Starbucks launched the payments app in the U.S. and claims 20 million payments have been made to date…
[Via: MobileBusinessBriefing]