An Exploratory Research On Building An Evaluation Index System For Shopping Street

As a necessary part of the city, shopping street mirrors the city economic development. It plays an important role in the business development of the city. For the city development and government's desire for city image, building and rebuilding shopping street is popular around the whole country. However, such problems as sales turnover decrease emerged.The literatures about building shopping street are abundant, some of which focus on introduction to design but lack theoretical support while some of which put forward qualitative suggestions hard to implement. Several scholars mentioned evaluation index system. However, they failed to take account of the means to enhance the attraction of shopping street. This resulted in a gap between the current research and the practical circumstances.Based on the characteristics of shopping street, this article focuses on improving the attraction of shopping street and explores shopping evaluation index system for the aim of building the right shopping street. The method of the current research includes in-depth interview and analytic hierarchy process.There are three phases in building evaluation index system of shopping street, identifying the evaluation index, experts rating and weighting each index. According to the interviews and literatures, the system consists of four indices: business factor, landscaping factor, transportation factor, and auxiliary facilities factor and their corresponding sub-indices. In particular, core stores, Time-honored Brands stores, variety, functions, and co-marketing activities comprise the business factor. Landscaping factor is composed of architecture style, street planting, traditional architecture retention, and business establishment. Transportation factor includes pedestrianization, the length of shopping street, parking convenience, bus facility and expedite road. Convenience facilities, security facilities and the facilities for the disabled constitute the auxiliary facility factor.A questionnaire is designed to measure the index weights. The questionnaires are delivered to the experts in distribution, city planning, and business real estate. Matlab7.0 is used to analyze the questionnaires. The weights for the four indices are 0.459412, 0.165323, 0.270016, and 0.105249 respectively. The results show the different impact of the four indices to the shopping streets attraction. The sub-index weights rank in the following order, (1) core stores, (2) variety, (3) functions, (4) bus facility,(5) Time-honored Brands stores, (6) expedite road,(7) parking convenience, (8) convenience establishment, (9) architecture style, (10) establishment, (11) street planting, (12) cooperate marketing activities, (13) walking of shopping street, (14) old architecture retention, (15) security establishment, (16) the length of shopping street, (17) establishment for the disabled.It is known from the above analysis that the business factor is the most important index, followed by the transportation factor, the landscaping factor and the auxiliary facility factor. The weight for business factor approaches to 0.5, indicating it is the core factor of shopping street. Once shopping street is short of it, the attraction will be sharply weakened.The weights of landscaping factor and auxiliary facility factor are 0.165323 and 0.105249 respectively. This proves that both factors are limited for consumer attraction. Since the factors are less important to consumers, there will be a phenomenon that the shopping street with good landscaping and complete auxiliary facilities attracts mass customers but exchanges are few.The samples of the current research are selected in Chongqing road and Changjiang road. The results indicate the system can mirror the real situation.That shows the system is practical in use.