Liu Minxia

mllmx@msn.com

A SHOPPING center in Futian District struck a deal with Alibaba’s local commerce platform Koubei on Thursday in a push to digitalize its services to woo younger-generation consumers.

The eight-story INJOY Mall that opened a year ago as the largest mall in Futian’s Meilin area is the first shopping center in Guangdong Province to partner with Koubei, which was created in June 2015 with 6 billion yuan (US$893 million) in investment from Alibaba and Ant Financial to enable brick-and-mortar shops to establish an online presence.

Koubei, which has an average of more than 5 million daily users in Shenzhen, has made deals with 300,000 shops across Guangdong, including 80,000 in Shenzhen, Yu Guojun, deputy general manager of Koubei’s Guangdong division, told reporters.

The deal will enable INJOY, developed by Shenzhen’s Excellence Group, to obtain precise data about their customers, including age, shopping preferences and buying power, said Zha Jun, general manager of Excellence’s commercial property arm.

Through Koubei, shoppers can access services like self-service parking fee payment, exclusive discounts, customer ratings of shops and real-time information on waiting lines.

By July 30, a total of 195 shops and restaurants at INJOY had taken advantage of services provided by Koubei, which said it had tracked 260,000 of the mall’s customers. INJOY averaged 70,000 daily visitors in its initial year of operation, according to Zha. A preliminary analysis showed that 63 percent of INJOY customers were born in the 1980s and 1990s, 76 percent are white-collar workers, 55 percent have children, and 82 percent spend at least 10,000 yuan annually on daily expenses.

“These data, along with more that we haven’t made public, will help INJOY learn more about their customers, and adjust their strategies and brands in turn,” said Yu.

The deal with Koubei is only the first step that Excellence is planning to take to digitalize its services, said Wang Shouxin, deputy general manager of the group’s data department. “Traditional developers like us are exploring ways to make use of the strengths of Internet companies to improve.”