The coffee chain is now accepting transactions completed through the smartphone friendly service.
Starbucks has just announced that it is broadening its mobile payments by accepting transactions through Square at approximately 7,000 of its coffee shop location.
This is just the next step in a broadening partnership that exists between the two companies.
The rollout was first announced in August and, three months later, it is still right on schedule with when they’d hoped it would begin. This gives customers at Starbucks the choice between two different mobile payments options in addition to the traditional purchasing methods.
Starbucks has already been highly successful with its mobile payments programs.
The customers who shop at the restaurants have proven to be mobile payments early adopters, having already used the Starbucks app to make over two million purchases every week on both Android and iOS. Now, smartphones and tablets can be used by customers in multiple ways in order to buy their coffee and snacks.
The reason that this is an important addition to the mobile payments offerings from the store is that it provides an experience that is unique from what was already available. The Starbucks app allowed a user to pay for purchases by using the balance from a prepaid card that had been stored in the device.
However, by accepting mobile payments from the Square app, customers can now buy items using a debit or credit card, too. At the moment, while the Starbucks app will allow customers to earn reward points, the Square app does not yet have that feature.
Both services use a barcode that is displayed at the point of sale and which can be scanned by the mobile device. Another difference between them, though, is that the Starbucks app works only at the coffee shop locations, where the Square Wallet gives consumers the chance to shop at other merchants and restaurants that accept that service.
The addition of Starbucks is a massive win for Square, a company based in San Francisco and that was founded by Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter. This will help the company to raise its mobile payments profile in order to be able to sign up more companies so that it can grow its position within the marketplace.
