New Delhi | 28th July 2020: With malls operating under specific safety guidelines issued by the government for the past one month now, social distancing has become a key concern for all the food vendors at the food courts. To help their customers avoid queues and chaos in such areas, Gurgaon-based O2O commerce and fintech platform DotPe has partnered with Nexus Malls. The platform is currently offering its digital ordering solutions fully integrated with a payment gateway to 30 food vendors across 3 major malls, Ahmedabad One, The Mall of Amritsar and Elante, Chandigarh’s food courts and is planning to get more brands on board.
A technology startup, DotPe provides neo digital transformation and commerce solutions to restaurants and F&B brands. By offering its QR code & WhatsApp based SCAN-ORDER-PAY solution, direct communication & digital ordering management technology to them, it can assist food courts to ensure streamlined business operations while following the social distancing norms and make customers feel safe through minimal human touch while ordering and settling the bill. As part of its association with Nexus Malls, DotPe has placed a common QR code across various floors of the mall whereas the floor managers and operations team will be guiding the customers on how to use it.
Guests can scan the QR code placed on the tables from their own mobile phones and view the menu of all the restaurants through their phone browsers just like an e-commerce catalogue. They can order from the catalogue while remaining seated at the food court or walking through the mall corridors while shopping and also make the payment through the phone using any medium including UPI. Order-related communication will further happen over the guests’ WhatsApp number. Once the orders are ready, guests can simply pick their orders from the counters of the food vendor and either dine in there or take away.
Speaking on the association, Shailaz Nag, Co-Founder and CEO, DotPe said, “Since social distancing is here to stay for long, customer safety remains the prime importance for every restaurant and food joints, especially in food court areas where ordering procedure, can be quite chaotic. By using our Digital Ordering solution, customers can avoid multiple human interventions. We have one QR code for all the food brands, which can be quite convenient for the customers who want to order food from their favourite vendors but end up avoiding the queues, being worried about safety.”
“Since Nexus Malls is one of the first-ever commercial establishments to get on board with us, we are quite thrilled that by deploying our QR-based solution, the restaurants at its mall’s food courts across Amritsar and Chandigarh have already started seeing significant business upticks. Their overall transaction settlement has come down as the payments were settled through UPI, whereas their pilferage rates have reduced to negligible, considering that more orders are being placed online. By adopting our solution, the merchants have also seen their cart values increase owing to variants push on every order by default irrespective of human intervention,” added Mr. Nag.
Mr Jayen Naik, Senior Vice President, Operations and Projects at Nexus Malls, said, ‘’At Nexus Malls, the safety of our patrons, retailers and staff is paramount. We are working with all our retail partners to ensure the experience at our malls is as contactless as possible. With DotPe, we have found a reliable partner who is able to provide a contactless food ordering platform across our malls wherever dine-in is permissible. We are certain, the patrons and our food court partners will find the solution provided by DotPe will be mutually beneficial to all stakeholders.’’
Visitors at both the malls too were quite impressed with the new mode of digital food ordering and payment. One of them said, “The best part is you don’t have to head to every brand’s counter and wait for the queue to end. It’s awesome how we can directly place our orders from our tables and continue maintaining social distancing norms. Choosing from multiple menus are easy, the payments are easy, what else do you want. It’s totally convenient in times like these.”
Currently, used by prominent food & beverages chains like Starbucks, McDonald’s, Haldiram’s, Social, Chilis, Barista, Cafe Delhi Heights to name a few. DotPe envisions onboarding 1 million merchants over the next few months to leverage its contactless dining solution and revolutionise retail and dining in the country.
