Starbucks rolls out mobile order for Android, rest of U.S.

SEATTLE – After a successful run in the Pacific Northwest and in states such as Alabama, Florida and Texas, Starbucks on Tuesday extended its mobile order and pay feature nationwide.

That means people in New York, Chicago and San Francisco can now order a latte on their smartphones, just as many Spokanites, Portlanders, Angelenos and Seattleites have in the past few months.

The Seattle-based coffee giant also enabled the feature, previously available only on Apple devices, on its Android app, expanding its universe to the other half of smartphone users.

The moves were announced at a New York investors conference in early September. At the time, the announcement surprised analysts, because until then the company had hinted toward a holiday-season rollout for the technology.

According to Starbucks executives, the feature was so popular, allowing coffee drinkers to skip long lines as they order and pay for their drinks on their smartphones, that they accelerated the expansion.

“The rollout has gone better than we expected” among both customers and staffers, said Adam Brotman, the executive in charge of Starbucks’ digital efforts.

Brotman won’t say how much mobile order and pay has boosted sales. But David Palmer, a longtime Starbucks analyst who works for RBC Capital Markets, said it’s as much as a 2 percent bump, which for a company with $19 billion in expected sales this year means hundreds of millions of dollars.

In a September note raising its earnings outlook for Starbucks, Palmer wrote that mobile ordering was key in driving the share of mobile payments to 21.6 percent of total sales in August 2015, up from 12.2 percent the previous year. RBC estimates that mobile ordering accounted for 15 percent of all sales in the Pacific Northwest region at the end of June, just six months after its debut in Portland and three months after being deployed in the Pacific Northwest.