An extra hour on site, 20% higher average basket: the OneFlash deployment at Les Terrasses du Port

Since July 2025, visitors to Les Terrasses du Port in Marseille have had access to a self-service OneFlash mobile charging service, spread across four stations strategically positioned throughout the shopping centre. A year after the deployment, the figures compiled by the site's teams are unequivocal: more than 5,000 users, around an hour of extra time on site, an average basket 20% higher than that of a typical visitor, and 1,600 Google reviews collected on the centre's page. A look back at a deployment whose measurable commercial impact shows how mobile charging has become a performance lever in its own right in modern retail.

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The smartphone, the backbone of the retail shopping journey

In a modern shopping centre, the phone concentrates most of the relationship between the brand and the customer. This is what Sofia, a sales adviser at the Izac shop in Les Terrasses du Port, sees every day. The phone is used to pay, to store loyalty cards, to check a shopping list prepared in advance, to find information researched before the visit, to compare products, to talk to family to confirm a choice and to trigger impulse purchases after spotting a product. “Now everything is digital. We need our phone all the time”, she sums up. This centrality creates an operational dependence that instantly turns into frustration as soon as the battery becomes critical.

For the shop as for the shopping centre that hosts it, this dependence is a concrete commercial issue. A customer whose phone dies halfway through a visit cuts it short, does not complete purchases in progress, no longer looks at available offers and does not share their experience on review platforms. Conversely, a customer reassured about their battery life extends their visit, takes more time to choose and more readily triggers the unplanned purchases that make all the difference to the turnover of a premium shopping centre.

A deployment designed to cover every key moment of the visit

The installation at Les Terrasses du Port was led by Théo Bourges, an account manager at OneFlash for two years, who supports network partners day to day on installation, follow-up and customer satisfaction. The principle adopted for the deployment was to cover all the high-traffic areas of the centre rather than concentrate a single station at the entrance. “The idea was really to cover all the important areas of the centre”, explains Théo Bourges. Four stations were positioned: at the main entrance, in front of the shop windows and in the food area.

This choice of location follows a precise logic of use. The entrance station captures visitors as soon as they arrive, those who anticipate their battery use or who arrive with a phone already part-drained. The stations in front of the shop windows capture visitors along their route, at the moment when impulse buying is decided and checking one's phone is a natural reflex. Finally, the station in the food area meets a particular moment of use: the lunch break is a period when visitors linger, take out their phones to take photos, communicate and compare, and when the need for charging increases without the speed of a fixed wall charger being able to meet it properly.

This geographical coverage radically changes the nature of the service. The station stops being an exceptional rescue point and becomes an everyday comfort feature built into the journey, present wherever the customer needs it.

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Measurable and attributable commercial results

One of the most remarkable aspects of the deployment at Les Terrasses du Port is the operator's ability to measure precisely the impact of the service on its business. The figures compiled since installation paint a particularly eloquent picture.

More than 5,000 users have used the service since July 2025, which shows rapid adoption and a real need among the centre's visitors. Beyond the raw volume, the most significant qualitative data point concerns the buying behaviour of these users. Analyses by the centre's team show that visitors who use the OneFlash service stay on average an hour longer in the shopping centre, and that their average basket is 20% higher than that of a visitor who does not use the service. Set against the volume of sessions, these figures translate into substantial additional revenue for the shops on the site.

The third indicator completes the picture: the centre's page has collected 1,600 Google reviews since installation, generated largely via the stations, which naturally prompt the user at the end of a session to share their experience. This massive, free collection of customer reviews mechanically improves the centre's local search ranking and its visibility to potential visitors, in a sector where reviews are a major conversion lever.

Feedback from retailers, the first revealer of the service

For the shops that lease space in the centre, the presence of the service translates into a direct improvement in the experience offered to their own customers. Sofia sees this shift every day at the Izac shop. She describes a service “that you need in the moment”, an immediate answer to a constraint that visitors cannot solve on their own. This perceived usefulness strengthens visitors' attachment to the shopping centre as a whole, beyond their relationship with each individual shop.

This dynamic is particularly valuable in the current competitive context of physical retail, where shopping centres must constantly justify their added value against digital alternatives. Offering a useful service, free or low-cost, that concretely improves visit comfort is a strong argument for retaining customers who might otherwise switch to other retail formats.

Operational excellence that keeps the promise over time

The commercial impact measured at Les Terrasses du Port would not have been possible without a strict operational standard for the actual availability of the service. A station that is there but empty of power banks, faulty equipment, a replacement that takes too long: these failings are enough to ruin the value of the system and discourage users for good. Théo Bourges stresses the importance of this day-to-day management. “We have a team dedicated every day to checking all the rentals taking place in the centre. The idea is to be able to replace a power bank as soon as there is a problem, make sure all rentals go as smoothly as possible and step in if needed.”

This operational set-up relies on in-house teams able to intervene quickly in the field, backed by a real-time management platform that instantly flags any anomaly on the deployed stations. The combination of centralised monitoring and dedicated human intervention is the foundation on which the reliability of the service rests, year after year.

Mobile charging, now inseparable from retail performance

The Les Terrasses du Port case study confirms what several other large-scale OneFlash deployments had already suggested: self-service mobile charging is no longer a peripheral extra to the customer experience, it is now a measurable pillar of it. Longer visits, a higher average basket, mass collection of reviews, satisfaction perceived by retailers and visitors alike: every indicator points in the same direction.

For shopping centre operators still hesitating about adding this type of service to their offer, the Les Terrasses du Port case is a numerical benchmark that is hard to ignore. It shows that a well-thought-out deployment, backed by a partner able to maintain operational quality over time, produces tangible effects on a site's commercial performance. In a sector where every point of average basket counts and where every minute a visitor spends becomes an asset to be leveraged, the charging station stands out as one of the quickest-return investments in contemporary retail.

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