The mobile gas app allows consumers to order gas online and Booster Fuels will deliver and fuel their car while the customer is at work.

Booster Fuels Inc. is driving e-commerce for gasoline forward.

The mobile gas app allows a consumer to purchase gasoline on her mobile app and then Booster Fuels will drive to where the car is parked and fill up the tank.

Booster Fuels, which provides services in the San Francisco and Dallas-Fort Worth areas, targets companies with many employees who drive to work. The businesses allow Booster Fuels to bring its gas-pumping vehicles into their parking lots so the gasoline retailer can access the vehicles.

Here’s how it works: A consumer parks her car as she normally would in the employee parking lot of her workplace. She opens the app while in or next to her car, taps “get gas today” and leaves her vehicle’s fuel door open. Booster Fuels will come sometime during the day to fill up her tank and then charge her saved payment credentials for the amount put in her tank.

If the consumer is not at her car when she requests the gas, the app provides a detailed map of her employee parking lot, and the consumer drags a pin to where her car is parked, much like the Uber app interface allows a user of the ride-hailing service to drag a pin to her location for pickup, says CEO Frank Mycroft.

advertisement

The Booster Fuel app launched in early 2015, and it services 250 companies, such as Cisco Systems Inc., Oracle Corp. and eBay Inc. Tens of thousands of consumers use the service every month and more than 70% of consumers are repeat users, Mycroft says. In 2016, Booster Fuels’ sales were “a high single digit” of millions of dollars, he says.

Gas prices are comparable, or 10 to 15 cents cheaper, to what a consumer would pay at a local gas station, Mycroft says.  The app displays Booster Fuel’s per-gallon price next to prices from the 10 closest gas stations. The app updates this data at least once a day, Mycroft says.

The consumer only pays the price of the gas, and there is no fee to employers that offer the service. Booster Fuels makes money on each transaction because it cuts out the middle man (the gas station) and doesn’t have to pay the overhead of owning the stations, Mycroft says.

Employers with thousands of employees are ideal for Booster Fuels. However, once it has signed up a couple of businesses in one area, it can then service smaller nearby companies, Mycroft says. On average, he says, a company with about 4,000 employees will generate about 100 orders for fillups each day.

advertisement

Booster Fuels uses specially designed vehicles that can receive gas from a supplier and pump the fuel into a car. The retailer has dozens of these vehicles and is adding to its fleet, Mycroft says without revealing specifics. The retailer hopes to expand into new markets in the coming year, he says.

Booster Fuels requires a consumer to order from the app on her smartphone, and not from a computer, as it needs to use a consumer’s geographic location to work. The retailer, which has 50 employees, has raised a total of $12.5 million dollars.

Favorite