Mobile Ordering

On a busy morning commute, you often walk past a coffee shop with a line that never seems to end. Mobile ordering moves that long line onto your phone screen. Order a hot Americano in the app as you step off the subway, and by the time you reach the shop, your drink is ready to grab at the counter.

Some services use geofencing (a virtual fence built from location data) to make this work. The app checks where your phone is and calculates how far you are from the store. Many services start making your drink as soon as the order comes in, so if you order from too far away, it can sit there and go cold. So they only accept orders from within a certain distance of the store, or they signal the kitchen to start when you get close.

That cuts way down on the time you used to spend ordering at the counter and standing there waiting. Even at the lunch rush, you don't have to deal with a cashier. You just pick up a drink that's ready right on your turn.

On your phone, it's just a few taps. Behind the scenes, though, some fairly complex networking is hard at work. When you tap the pay button in the app, your order first travels over the network to the coffee company's central cloud server.

The central server processes the order and passes it in real time to the store's POS system (point of sale, the device that handles payments and store management). An order ticket then shows up on the kitchen screen, or a receipt prints out on a dedicated printer. When the barista taps the "done" button on the screen, the server notices and sends a real-time push notification to your phone.

All of this links up smoothly in just a few seconds because of APIs (rules that let different programs talk to each other) and a solid real-time network. Thanks to them, the customer and the staff don't have to say a word to each other, and still enjoy the convenience of handing off the drink at exactly the right moment.

Mobile ordering does more than cut your wait. It remembers your usual complicated customizations, like swapping milk for soy milk or going light on ice, and lets you reorder the exact same drink with a single tap.

It makes things easier for the store, too, with inventory and staffing. When a certain syrup or type of coffee bean runs out, the store can mark it "sold out" on the app menu right away, which avoids needless friction with customers. Staff who used to be tied to the counter taking orders can focus on making drinks and serving customers, so the store runs far more efficiently.

Stores are also evolving toward more refined personalized service. They use the order data they've built up to predict the busy hours and to offer coupons that fit the season or the weather.