A mall programme lives or dies on how many tenants are actually issuing points on a Saturday afternoon. Signing them is the easy part; getting their tills, their staff and their finance team to cooperate is the project.
Most mall operators budget for the platform and forget the onboarding. Then month three arrives, forty tenants are signed, eleven are live, and the shopper app looks empty in exactly the categories people came for.
Count the work per tenant, not per contract
Every tenant needs a till integration or a receipt-scan fallback, a staff briefing, a test transaction and someone named who answers the phone when it breaks. That is roughly half a day of your team’s time per store, and it does not scale by signing faster.
Sequence it by footfall instead. Get the twenty tenants that account for most of the traffic live first, launch on those, and bring the long tail in over the following quarter rather than holding the launch hostage to them.
Give the small tenants a way in without integration
Not every unit has an API. A receipt-scan or a simple staff app covers the kiosk, the barber and the phone-case stand, and it keeps the programme feeling complete to shoppers who do not care which tenant is technically integrated.
Shoppers judge a mall programme by the store they wanted to use it in, not by your integration coverage rate.
The manual routes are slower to reconcile, so cap them: fine at launch, replaced with a proper feed once a tenant proves volume.
Measure tenants like you measure the programme
Track issuance and redemption per tenant weekly. The ones with no activity are not lazy — usually something is broken, a printer, a login, a briefing that never happened, and a five-minute call fixes it.
Publish a simple league table back to tenants. Nothing motivates a store manager like seeing the unit two doors down enrolling three times as many shoppers.
We design and run loyalty programmes for restaurant groups, hotels, malls and retailers across the GCC. Everything here comes off live projects.
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