Sunway Malls is set to roll out its e-commerce platform – Sunway eMall.com on October 27. The e-commerce push is part of the mall group’s strategic digitalisation effort to complete its physical and digital mall presence.
“Certainly the venture into digital place opens up new markets and possibilities for Sunway Malls. We are not time and geographical bound,” said HC Chan, CEO of Sunway Malls & Theme Park.
“Sunway eMall will complement our current combined 4.5 million sqft of physical retail space of seven malls. It amalgamates our seven physical malls presence into 1 digital mall. Through this exercise, Sunway Malls portfolio has also grown to malls – physically and digitally,” explains HC Chan, CEO of Sunway Malls and Theme Park.
An initial 200 merchants covering various trade categories such as fashion, home & living, beauty, health & wellness, food & beverage e-vouchers, and others are on board with 30,000 SKUs. The list of participating merchants includes Sony, Huawei, Sketchers, Li Ning, Braun Buffel, Aldo, L’Occitane, Christy Ng, Hooga, and more. Sunway eMall projects to grow this to 500 merchants with 100,000 SKUs over the next 18 months.
The official launch of Sunway eMall will also enable Sunway Malls to offer an Offline-to Online-to-Offline (O2O) journey with the convergence of both online and offline shopping experiences. It supports the mall group operator to switch seamlessly between these two domains in a more effortless manner and to offer the best of both worlds.
“Additionally, what separates pure e-commerce players is the option for in-store collection apart from delivery, which is a further catalyst in driving more footfall into our malls. We see a great upside to this,” says Chan.
Apart from completing the physical-digital mall presence, the mall group is eyeing the e-commerce platform as an insurance and contingency against unforeseen geographical or retail sub-sectors lockdown.
In other development, the group’s physical malls also showed signs of good recovery with the complete reopening of the retail sector. As of October, preliminary indicators have shown 80% traffic normality compared to the same pre-pandemic period of 2019, with shoppers making a strong return to Sunway Malls in the beginning of Q42021. The number is expected to pick up pace heading nearer to the year-end festivity.
Sunway Malls is optimistic that its recovery can be sustained as Malaysia prepares to move from pandemic to endemic with the full compliance of safety protocols. It expects attaining full pre-pandemic level performance in the near term.
