Today’s shopping malls are still money-making hubs. According to Statista’s prediction, global retail sales will be more than $26 trillion by the end of the current year. With more than $26 trillion in projected sales, shopping malls are leading the way as the key revenue earners. Even though shopping malls are the leading source of retail sales, there is still problems faced by shopping malls.

One major problem that holds malls back is that big retail centers either anger or bore 80% of shoppers. There just isn’t enough excitement for shoppers in these malls, and finding stores in these centers is just too hard. Sure, amenities such as rock climbing, roller coasters, or valet parking are all great ways to occupy the mind of visitors, but these activities don’t turn guests into retail buyers. 
Low-quality indoor positioning systems also cause problems for shopping malls. It’s simple, a shopper can’t buy an item if they don’t know where it is. Shoppers suffer from frustration when they can’t find what they’re looking for and end up not spending money in the shopping mall at all.

This is just one problem shopping centers face when they have a poor indoor navigation system. 

On the other hand, shopping malls with poor indoor navigation face problems such as:

1) Ruining the customer experience

Customers who cannot cruise through the shopping center with ease miss out on other experiences such as trying on new clothes and testing new products. However, it is only one of many problems areas in malls with poor indoor navigation. The more you over look navigation, bigger the problem is for mall visitors. This is a big problem because 86% of shoppers are willing to pay more for excellent customer experience.
Being lost is one of the top reasons hampering the shopping experience.

2) Creating bottlenecks

Thousands of shoppers visit malls everyday. At peak times, it’s almost impossible to avoid crowds and high traffic. But, the real problem occurs when people rush into that narrow area of the mall where all the popular stores are. This is another problem malls with poor indoor navigation face. The crowd throng into high-traffic areas, awaiting release of new products or the biggest sale of the year to start. There’s a point in the shoppers experience when these large crowds stop being fun and entertaining, and turn into a nightmare. Shoppers who have no interest in these high traffic areas of the mall need to know how to avoid them.  

3) Reducing customer loyalty 

Loyal customers are customers who express gratitude by repeating their visits or orders. However, customer satisfaction is a far cry if they can’t even find their way around the shopping mall. Every marketer knows it’s a persisting problem because it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain a returning one. Helping customers easily locate their favorite stores is the only way to keep them satisfied. 

4) Jeopardizing customer safety

The jeopardization of safety can cause very serious consequences to shopping malls. If shoppers can’t get in and out of shopping malls quickly, they face the danger of panic behavior such as stampedes. Incidents such as shootings, or fires leave shoppers running around looking for exits. We understand that these are worst-case scenarios, however, it is far from impossible. If you don’t create a simple mall layout and allow shoppers the opportunity to orient with it through Mall mApp’s indoor location platform incidents such as these can become much worse. 

5) Diminishing zone-to-zone conversion rates

Shopping mall owners should use navigation platforms to give turn-by-turn directions and analyze popular routes. If they don’t analyze the routes of their mall, there is a real danger of minimizing zone-to-zone conversion rates.

Picture Zara and H&M attracting the same type of shoppers. Using Mall mApp would help the mall owner decide to position the two stores close to each other, with one or two less attractive stores in between. This strategy would improve the profitability of each store in the neighborhood and make it easier for this targeted shopper group to move around the mall. 

Mall mApp’s indoor navigation platform solves all these problems for free.

If the issues mentioned above seem unanswerable, don’t worry because they’re not. There’s a quick fix for all those issues; Mall mApp.  

Mall mApp offers you high-quality indoor navigation for shopping centers. The platform does not require any additional investments, and the deployment of the technology takes only a few days.

You can forget about complex hardware-based systems that require weeks or months for implementation. Mall mApp gives you an advanced navigation platform, with marketing and analytics tied in to drastically improve user experience.