Smartac Enables Mobile Retail Transformation for Link City Shopping Center with Relay2 Service-Ready Wi-Fi
SmartAC is a large hotspot operator in China that partners with Suzhou Link City Shopping Mall. Suzhou Link City Shopping Mall provides a luxury one-stop shopping experience that includes retail, dining, leisure, entertainment, and community service.
The shopping center—which has 150,000 square meters of floor space across six floors—is home to a variety of major local and Western brands, including Sam’s Club, H&M, and many others. The facility includes over 50 restaurants, a cinema complex, and a 10,000-square-meter indoor theme park.
However, with the rise of e-commerce and digital retail, shopping centers like Link City are asking how technology can be leveraged to attract and retain mobile visitors.
Industry
Location
The Challenge
THE CHALLENGE
To enhance the shopper experience, Link City decided to pursue a complete digital retail transformation that included social networking, interactive digital signage, and branded mobile applications. To support this, Link City also needed to modernize its Wi-Fi infrastructure to facilitate engagement while customers were on site.
Link City’s objective was to change Wi-Fi from being a “nice to have” amenity to a business-centric and sales-dependent capability. Through this effort, Link City expected this effort to dramatically improve traffic and sales for shop owners and brands while providing a more personalized and intimate experience for every shopper.
To lead the digital transformation, Link City partnered with SmartAC, a large hotspot operator in China.
“The Wi-Fi network collects location information of consumers to enable mall managers to understand consumer behaviors and traffic distribution in the mall in real time.”
— SmartAC Representative
THE SOLUTION
After an extensive selection process, SmartAC chose Relay2 for the Link City deployment. The selection was driven by Relay2’s robust Wi-Fi performance, ease of deployment and management, and platform openness to facilitate the integration of value-added capabilities, including indoor location-based services.
SmartAC deployed a total of 150 Relay2 Service-Ready Access Points™ across the shopping mall. These provide robust, high-performance coverage of the entire mall, including shops, indoor atriums, dining areas, parking lots, and offices. Leveraging advanced inter-AP coordination, the solution supports dynamic power control and load balance functions to provide reliable and stable wireless connections, even under high-density access scenarios, such as popular marketing promotion events in the atrium or during high-traffic festival and sale days.
THE RESULTS
While providing visitors with reliable high-speed wireless coverage throughout Link City, the Wi-Fi has also enabled SmartAC to roll out capabilities that create a seamless online-to-on-site digital experience for mobile shoppers. This includes social media campaigns that encourage shoppers to visit partner stores. Smart interactive screens throughout the mall provide store information, maps, events, advertisements, and coupons. The screens also allow interaction via mobile phones so that shoppers can participate in sales promotions, events, and games.
Furthermore, SmartAC was able to provide key business insights to Link City management: “The Wi-Fi network collects location information of consumers to enable mall managers to understand consumer behaviors and traffic distribution in the mall in real time,” said one representative.