Meet Nilesh

Nilesh has been running Nils Convenience Store in Ilford for over 40 years. Since 1991, he has served his local community and ran the business with his father initially. Today, the store continues to be a family business as Nilesh works alongside Kashmira, his wife, and his younger son.

“Even through tough times like COVID, we see a regular flow of customers visiting our store to top-up their British Gas keys and cards or pay for Dartford crossing.”

We asked Nilesh why he joined Payzone.

As a prominent member of The Federation for Independent Retailers (NFRN) in London, I have always been proactive when it comes to giving my customers services that they value. After all, that’s what helps me compete with other stores in the area.

Joining Payzone means that my customers have access to a wide range of bill payment services. You can offer a lot through one terminal such as the ability to pay gas and electricity bills, council tax and mobile phone top-ups. I think our location means there’s also demand for other Payzone services, such as paying the Dartford crossing charge and topping up travel cards.

Having a service like Payzone is helpful when it comes to getting people through the door. However, in my experience, making sure you have the grocery items that people want is hugely important too. Here at Nils, we have expanded our store so that we can offer our customers a better choice of chilled and ambient goods.

By having a great choice of groceries in-store, our customers buy more grocery items when they pop in to pay a bill or top-up.

During the pandemic, lots of customers still needed access to Payzone services. We noticed that many of them were buying more groceries at Nils than they did before COVID. I think this is because they could buy what they needed from us without going to a big supermarket.

Now that lockdown has eased, we are welcoming back many of our regular customers who work in the office blocks opposite the shop, which is lovely to see. But we are hoping that a higher percentage of people will stick to shopping local and continue to support independent retailers such as ourselves.