SEATTLE—Starbucks is testing a cashless store at a new location here to better understand how digital and credit card payments affect customer behavior and experience.
Seattle is the same market in which Amazon has been testing its cashier-less Amazon Go stores.
The company added 1.4 million Starbucks Rewards members in the U.S. in the last quarter, raising its total number to 14.2 million. The coffee giant is working on a way to reach non-Rewards members in the digital arena, including making mobile order and pay available to all customers in March, CNBC reported.
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"Thirty percent of our payments in the United States [are] done with a mobile phone," CEO Kevin Johnson said on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "Over 40% is done with phones and Star Value cards with rewards. In China, over 60% of our tenders come from mobile payments."
As more and more Starbucks customers pay for their coffees with their phones, the company must work to accommodate this behavior and leverage mobile ordering and digital marketing to increase the number of times consumers visit the coffee shop, CNBC said.
Starbucks isn't the only company to testing out cashless locations. In October, Shake Shack announced that it was building a cashless, kiosk-only location in New York City to test out a variety of digital innovations and ways of connecting with its consumers, CNBC reported.