If you don’t have a top-of-mind mobile app that makes it simple for customers to connect with you and buy from you, you aren’t going to exist.
Doug Stephens, Retail Prophet
Subway sandwich chain has acquired a small Vancouver digital technology company, Cardant Software, to help it take a greater bite out of a fast-food market increasingly driven by online and mobile orders.
Milford, Conn.-based Subway bought the 20-person Cardant team from its partner Avanti Commerce, a Vancouver-based online commerce solution provider.
Cardant built Subway a customized, cloud-based ecommerce platform used for desktop and app-based orders. The service was rolled out in the U.S. about a year and a half ago and is coming to Canada.
“We decided this area was so strategic that we really had to invest heavily in it,” said Carman Wenkoff, Subway’s chief information officer and chief digital officer. “It will be one of the core technology platforms taking us forward.”
The deal comes after Subway recently created a digital division to help improve everything from its app and loyalty program to back-end design and ways to personalize the customer experience.
“Restaurants that can offer additional options like order-in-advance or have it delivered are the chains that are winning right now with their customers,” said Wenkoff, who worked in Vancouver’s tech community in the 1990s.
It’s a market Starbucks has been tapping into for years, and now dominates with its popular ordering, payment and loyalty program app, noted retail consultant Doug Stephens, founder of Retail Prophet.
Chains such as Subway are catching up to the trend and also competing with a growing number of third-party order-taking apps such as JustEat.ca.
“I think this is a realization on Subway’s part: if you don’t have an incredibly easy, frictionless way for consumers to connect with you through mobile, you will soon become invisible,” Stephens told Marketing.
He likened it to the time, not that long ago, when businesses were largely ignored if they didn’t have a website. “The same is going to be true of mobile very shortly, that if you don’t have a top-of-mind mobile app that makes it simple for customers to connect with you and buy from you, you aren’t going to exist,” Stephens said. “It doesn’t matter how many locations you have.”
Subway said it would continue to work with Avanti on its digital strategy. The teams are currently developing an in-restaurant kiosk program.
