Portland Starbucks Locations First to Beta Test iPhone Order-Ahead Feature

Back in March it was first reported Starbucks was set to test a new mobile order and pay system right from iPhones, with a future beta city to be announced later on.

That city has turned out to be Portland, Oregon, as customers there will now be able to pre-order and pay for beverages from their iPhone, walk into a store and grab their drinks, bypassing the line, according to WIRED:

The new “Order” tab will simply appear in customers’ apps when they’re within a set of GPS coordinates where the service has become available. (Where it’s not, users will see a new “Menu” tab.) And it won’t even seem like a radical change. If you’re paying at the counter with your phone already, ordering with it, too, won’t seem any weirder than ordering from Amazon.

“We designed this mobile order-and-pay capability to just feel like a natural extension from an experience perspective,” Starbucks Chief Digital Officer Adam Brotman tells WIRED.

Future rollouts at its 12,000 U.S. locations will happen on a city-by-city basis in 2015. According to the coffee-chain’s CEO, Starbucks processes 47 million transactions weekly with 15% (7 million) of these happening via mobile, which is pretty impressive.

Starbucks also has plans to roll out delivery in the U.S. sometime in the future, along with leveraging its popular smartphone app as a digital wallet to be used at other retailers as well.

It most likely will be a while before we see this new technology in Canada, so don’t hold your breath. Starbucks enabled mobile app payments for Canadians back in the fall of 2011.