PlusCityDigital strategy

A shopping mall of superlatives: With 70,000 square meters sales floor, more than 200 shops and some 50 restaurants, 4,500 parking spaces, nearly 3,000 employees and an average of 25,000 visitors per day, PlusCity counts among Austria's largest and most successful shopping centers in Austria. Every Upper Austrian knows PlusCity, and shops there regularly.

PlusCity's digital presence creates one more new benchmark: At first glance it is an elegantly standardized web and app family with a clear focus on user experience quality for shoppers, employees and tenants. A closer look reveals a cleverly developed and implemented holistic, integrated digital strategy with a multi-year horizon. This is a sustainable concept to help a Premium Shopping Center build and expand its competitive edge by continuously providing visitors and tenants with new, helpful digital services.

After reviewing the currently used technologies and holding workshops with everybody involved, Netural sat down with the PlusCity team to create individual customer journeys for the various user types and laying the groundwork for a digital vision and roadmap towards the future MOS, the Mall Operating System. Based on this digital strategy, Netural developed and implemented both the Plus City website and the app with a new UX, design and development. From now on, every PlusCity visit will be a combined analogue/digital experience, with personalized services and offers for every user. Offering the full spectrum from news, events and vouchers down to a booking system for gastronomy and entertainment and guidance systems for shops and parking spaces, it leaves nothing to the wish.

At the same time, PlusCity provides its tenants with a new digital full-spectrum cockpit: a tool that makes is easy to participate in promotions and events or to boost sales by, for example, issuing vouchers. The PlusCity Cockpit even supports shop operators in staff planning and inventory management, providing precise footfall forecasts. The new PlusCity cockpit will save operators and tenants precious time and resources, supporting the transmitting of promotional content, increasing tenant participation and, in turn, footfall and sales in Upper Austria's favourite shopping mall. With just a few clicks, users find every shop, book movie tickets, restaurant tables or even childcare – and in the end, find the way back to their parked cars.

In addition to latest UX/UI design, Netural uses a wide variety of latest state-of-the-art technologies to build the PlusCity Mall Operating System, including Algolia for page search and the headless Storyblok CMS for all PlusCity website content. Building on Angular JS as the Java Script Framework for the PlusCity Cockpit, Netural also used TypeScript and “Component Thinking” to create a clean code base.