Starbucks Korea sees boom in mobile orders

Starbucks Coffee Korea employees pose with a smartphone and a cup of latte at a Starbucks Coffee shop in Seoul as its customers made more than 20 million orders via its Siren Order application. The coffee chain said it will offer free coffees to 16,000 customers from May 2 to 8. / Courtesy of Starbucks Coffee Korea

By Park Jae-hyuk

Starbucks Coffee Korea said Sunday that it has received more than 20 million customer orders via its Siren Order application.

Its online-to-offline (O2O) app service was launched in Korea in May 2014, enabling customers to order and pay for food and coffee with their smartphones.

It took the coffee app 950 days to receive 10 million orders since the launch. But it only needed 210 days to get 10 million more orders in the second half of last year amid the growing use of apps for orders and payments.

About 55,000 orders are made via the company’s Siren Order a day. This is compared to 2,000 orders on average a day in 2014, and 34,000 orders in September last year. Stores here receive a total of some 500,000 orders a day.

Starbucks Korea said its convenient ordering system is increasingly satisfying mobile-savvy customers, and will seek to further improve the app.

“We will improve its voice recognition and personalized recommendation systems to offer an optimized digital experience to our customers,” a Starbucks Korea official said. “We will continue to introduce new forms of lifestyle for Korean customers.”

To further celebrate its mobile milestone, the local unit of the U.S. coffeehouse will offer free beverages to 16,000 customers from May 2 to 8.

Starbucks Coffee Korea posted 1.03 trillion won in sales last year to top the 1 trillion won mark for the first time in the industry.

The number of coffee shops in Korea is estimated to have topped 100,000 ─ almost double the number of convenience stores here, according to Small Enterprises and Market Service.