What do customers and café owners have to gain with a mobile app?
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Now that I have picked Flutter, I will describe the first mobile app that I made.
I recently talked to a café chain where they wanted to revamp their website to create an online store to sell their shelf items (e.g. coffee beans, espresso machines) and ship to customers.
It is very easy to create a store at platforms such as Shopify to do this. Our discussion continued to talk about selling on mobile phones and I was surprised at how they don’t have an app already that can sell food and drink items.
Customers’ Benefits
For customers, the benefits are plentiful and obvious:
Skip the Line
Instead of waiting in line at the cashier or for the waiter to take your order, you can put in the order on your phone and the kitchen can prepare it immediately.
Never Forget Your Loyalty Card
How many loyalty cards with 1 stamp do you have because you always forget to bring it with you?
Some payment apps offer this (e.g. Apple Wallet, Google Pay) but they don’t let you add menu items.
Easy Access to Store Menu
Customers can now easily access the latest store menu, which can be updated as frequently as needed.
Store Owners’ Benefits
Developing a mobile app today is a lot cheaper (both in terms of time and money) than a few years. The benefits easily outweigh the costs for store owners:
Reduce Staff Needed
An app that takes orders transforms every customer’s phone into a POS (Point of Sale System). The order is no longer restricted to be taken only at the cash register. Not only does this help reduce cashier staff, but it also helps reduce the staff power needed for cashier balancing and depositing cash to the banks or ATM.
Individual Customer Intelligence
Store owners only have aggregate data on their customers (e.g. busiest time of the day, most popular item) through their POS system. However, with the mobile app, any customers that order through the app will be building their individual order history. This is essential for the stores in understanding their customers’ individual preferences and habits.
Free coffee on their birthday?
Offer drink and food combo deals to customers who only buy drinks?
Direct Channel to Customers
The app provides a 2-way communication channel. Stores can now reach out directly to their customer through the app. This can be in the form of notifications of promotional materials (e.g. new menu items), to a direct chat between the customers and store staff for feedbacks.
Proven Success
Selling coffee on mobile apps is not only a complementary strategy for cafés such as Starbucks, but coffee chains like Luckin Coffee have made mobile ordering their main channel for sales. This is so successful for them that they are already ranked 2nd in China and threatening Starbucks to become the biggest coffee chain in China.
Let’s look at how I built one in the next article.