Starbucks Mobile Order & Pay Expands To 21 More States

Starbucks Mobile Order & Pay is brewing right along, just as Starbucks’ executive team had promised it would.

The company announced yesterday (June 16) that its mobile ordering service has now expanded to 3,400 more U.S. stores across 21 more states in the southern and central U.S. The pilot program that began in Portland in December 2014, before expanding across the Pacific Northwest, appears to have been a success as Starbucks stays on plan to rollout the service across the country.

According to Starbucks, the rollout for its management team has also been smooth: “Store managers say it helps partners provide customers one more way to connect with Starbucks, and the easy-to-use feature has proven convenient for customers eager to save time throughout their day,” the company wrote in a blog post.

In Starbucks’ second-quarter earnings call in April, Starbucks announced it had reached the next millionth milestone: 8 million mobile transactions per week. Just to put that figure into context, that’s close to having every resident of New York City make a mobile transaction at Starbucks, once a week.

Starbucks also saw record card redemption in Q2, along with a record number of card loads — which hit $1.1 billion for North America. On its mobile app side, Starbucks has reached 16 million active users, and that may go up as Mobile Order & Pay expands across the country — which it is expected to do by the end of 2015.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said at the end of 2014 that the launch of Starbucks’ Mobile Order & Pay app would be the single most important technology innovation introduced last year. It’s clear it’s going to be the most important in 2015 as well.

Starbucks announced in March that it was expanding its Mobile Order & Pay services beyond its test market in Portland to Seattle and across the Pacific Northwest. At that time, Mobile Order & Pay was still only available for iPhone and will soon be available for use at 650 locations in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Alaska.

To check out what else is HOT in the world of payments, click here.