Nexus Malls achieve 90 per cent business recovery owing to online deliveries

Nexus Malls has reported 90 per cent business recovery on the back of various technology and operational interventions including its partnership with retailers to enable online deliveries from mall outlets.

“We created special zones for them to ensure that all online sales or online ordering from the malls was made easier. This helped retailers as they could service customers quickly and did not have to source the orders from the warehouse and wait for a day or two.” Jayen Naik, senior vice president for operations and projects, Nexus Malls, told BusinessLine .

He added that online orders from mall outlets also served as a good source of revenue for the mall, as their majority of partnerships with brands have an aspect of revenue-sharing and so higher the sales processed at these stores, higher the mall’s revenue share.

Naik believes that these kinds of partnerships will continue in the future wherein brick and mortar stores combine their offline presence to aid in reaching and delivering the customers quickly. While these deliveries were happening before the pandemic as well, he noted that the volumes have accelerated post-pandemic.

A majority of these online orders were serviced by F&B, along with beauty brands like Nykaa, Sephora, toy stores like Hamley’s, and some fashion brands as well. Further, Nexus Malls also invested in retailers’ marketing programs and introduced concepts like ‘shop and win’ which incentivised customers to spend more, this helped ensure that even if the mall footfall was comparatively lower the customers were spending more than the average.

In addition to this, the group has also worked on enabling contactless ordering at F&B outlets. At its Bengaluru Malls, Nexus Malls will be implementing FastTag parking at the mall, which will scan the tag at the entrance of the mall and deduct parking charges money automatically, at the exit. This is expected to considerably reduce the waiting time at the exit points of the car parking.

The brand claims to have also maintained 95 per cent occupancy rate and now aims to recover 100 per cent of the 2019 business, by December end.

During the course of the pandemic, Nexus Malls completed the transition of seven malls in the Forum Malls portfolio. Forum Koramangala Mall, Forum Shantiniketan Mall, and Forum Neighbourhood Mall are now owned and operated by Nexus Malls. The other two Karnataka malls under the Nexus Malls portfolio are Forum Centre City Mall, Mysuru and Forum Fiza Mall, Mangalore. During the course of the lockdown, over 25 new stores have been added across the groups' Bangalore malls.

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