An Exploratory Research On The Commercial Element In The Evaluation System Of Shopping Street's Attractiveness

Along with the rise of exploring and rebuilding the shopping streets in China, we found that many developed shopping streets had worded on the wane, lost their attractiveness and not had the customer amount as before; many shopping street's customer amount and sales amount had declined after being rebuilt and expanded, so the key point to solve this problem is to find out how the shopping street attracts customers. The ability of the shopping street attracting people is according to the attractiveness of itself and customers' demand. So this article is starting from the characteristic of the shopping street, focus on the business elements of the shopping street's attractiveness, and get the evaluation index of the business elements of the shopping street's attractiveness.Through a review of relevant literature, we can see many scholars centered on how to guide the development of shopping street, which generally consists of studies in three perspective: (1) From the competition theory, take the competitiveness of a shopping street as the subjects, establish an evaluation system or to find factors; (2) From consumer behavior characteristics or needs to study shopping street location and the ability of attracting consumers; (3) Take the shopping street and "shopping center" as the same commercial facilities, doing unified planning, construction and management, which will introduce the shopping mall management theory to shopping street management. However, these studies, there have many deficiencies: evaluation of the proposed indicators or factors is lack of scientific method's supporting , so lack of validity of the conclusions; or do not use the theoretical explanation to explain why the shopping street attract customers to patronize, such as retail drawing power theory, and therefore, although these studies can explain that how shopping street attract consumers to some extent, it is hard to do depth discussion of the causes of the attracting in details; looking shopping street and "shopping center" as the same organizations. It will ignore some clear and important characters between shopping street and shopping center. So based on these deficiencies, this article start to do research.In this study, retail drawing power theory and the retail image are the theoretical basic, first of all, did Focus Group through the 24 consumers (of four groups), using content analysis to analyses the results, and got the preliminary business elements of the attractiveness of shopping street. Then select three shopping streets in different geographical regions in Kaohsiung of Taiwan ,do questionnaires in Sanduo road, Hanshin Arena, Shinkuchan shopping street, analyses the data through exploratory factor analysis, and got the 6 commercial elements of the attractiveness of shopping street and 24 items that can explain the 6 factors, Then followed by confirmatory factor analysis to make validate of the index and the stability of the factors. At last the index has also passed the reliability and validity test, and got the weight of each factors.The commercial elements of the six indicators are: goods, services, type of retailing, marketing, traditional features and prices. The secondary indicators which explains the "goods" include: number of commodities, the number of outlets for their products, Commercial Street fame, fashion information, fashion goods and product quality; "services" includes: staff quality, additional services, service attitude reasonable suggestions and can be returned; "type of retailing" includes: Featured store, unique products, special offers and a variety of shops; "marketing" includes: shopping street advertising and joint marketing; "traditional features "including: native local snacks and old shops; "price" includes: high and low price, the price is acceptable, many cheaper shops..This research got the commercial elements in the Evaluation System of shopping street's attractiveness, and it provided an important contribution of the building Evaluation System of shopping street .Theoretical contribution is to enrich the knowledge shopping street, and further improve the index system. From the consumers' point of view, got the weighs of commercial elements of evaluation. Also this research combine the needs of consumers, it is able to reflect the compositions of commercial elements of the attractiveness of shopping streets, this index will help the shopping street's management and provide the basis for the manager of shopping street and the retailers to do invest and marketing.