Starbucks Case Analysis

Reem Alawieh

(3018273)

Starbucks was established in 1971 where three university students decided to open a small coffee shop in Seattle with a goal of selling high quality coffee using new roasting techniques. Soon enough Starbucks became famous worldwide. Starbucks known by third place that combines both home and work in a unique place that connects with consumers at a personal level. In 2013 after the largest coffee chain in Canada Tim Hortons launched its first mobile payments services Starbucks had to come up with new technologies to be aligned with their competitors.

Starbucks in Canada is facing a lot of challenges as other coffee shops are expanding at the same speed and faster, MacDonald and Tim Horton’s are selling coffee for cheaper at a faster services speed. Another challenge Starbucks is facing is that people are finding it shifting from its main purpose which is the “third place” to becoming less suitable for long visits: “ smaller tables...louder music…”

Starbucks has low speed service and high prices compared with other competitors who sell the same product with faster speed services. In January 2011 Starbucks launched the Starbucks app where 10 per cent of its customers were using it.

Mobile payment is a point of sale transaction made or received with a mobile device; there are three potential solutions that Starbucks can consider, 1. Stand alone, 2. Banks 3. Third party. Mobile payment platforms are very difficult platforms and that is because there are a high number of interdependency stakeholders involved, such as banks, users, merchant, etc. The platform’s main goal is to reach a large number of users in a short amount of time. But the challenge is that the platform needs to get both sides of users on-board in order to achieve success, and in order to get a large number of merchants you need to have a lot of users and the opposite is true if you do not have enough merchants you can not get a lot of users and if the platform can not...