Major cities on the Chinese Mainland are famous for their shopping streets, which are key tourist destinations in travel guides. These streets generally see great people traffic without great consumption performance. What obstruct these streets to become shoppers’ paradise?   The 1033 meter long Nanjing Road in Shanghai became a pedestrian street in 1999. It strives to combine functions of shopping, tourism, business, culture and exhibitions. During the first few years, it generated visitor traffic of one million per day on average. The characteristics as a pedestrian street ease the contradiction between vehicle traffic and commercial activities, providing more shopping space for consumers.   However, to the retail outlets along the street, particularly large-scale department stores, great guest traffic has not yet bought the expected sales performance. Many even experienced fall in sales and operation performance. Consumers look more than making actual purchases. Why is that?   “This is because in many Chinese Mainland cities, Shanghai included, fail to accurately position their shopping streets as products in the market,” says the vice-chairman of Shanghai commerce & economy research center Qi Xiaochai, “They lack the necessary consumer and market research that is a prerequisite for accurate market positioning to guarantee greater spending. More effort needs to be paid on investigating the target traffic, consumer’s intentions to go to the shopping street and their consumption demands.”   In recent years, many Chinese Mainland cities try to transform the best locations with the busiest traffic in the city centers into shopping streets. They generally tend to introduce top international brands to draw consumers. Contradictions, nonetheless, are created: On one hand, foreign tourists, the main component of shopping street traffic, are not drawn to luxury, top-end foreign products or brands. On the other hand, top-end international brands also try to avoid establishing outlets on over-crowded and noisy shopping streets.   A report on commercial areas in Shanghai released by Shanghai Commerce & Economy Research Center showed that among the eight main commercial areas in Shanghai, Nanjing Road has the highest average daily consumer rate. If “efficient consumer traffic” is defined as those with clear shopping intentions and “inefficient consumer traffic” as those without, Yuyuan Garden and Huaihai Road have much higher “efficient consumer traffic” even with lower average daily consumer rate.   Professor Sun Yuanxin, of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and also China Commerce and Economy Association says that whether a shopping street can be successful depends much on whether it can achieve a breakthrough from mere shopping functions. It needs to attach more importance to avoiding a high concentration of similar industries or products: “Nanjing Road, for example, is characterized by large number of tourists. Therefore, the street should be more service-oriented and introduce service industries including dining, fashion, leisure and entertainment to help transform consumer traffic to commercial traffic. At the same time, the contribution of department stores to the overall commercial structure should be made more balanced with a more diverse product range that can differentiate each department store in a more distinctive way.”   Similar examples can be found in Tianjin where its two commercial streets, Hepin Road and Binjiang Road, also face the same problem of high consumer traffic but low consumption rates. The two streets started to decline in business volumes since the late 1990s.   In 1999, the city of Tianjin invested 200 million yuan (US$25 million) to transform Binjiang Road into a 1,000-meter pedestrian commercial street that is followed by a 400 million yuan (US$50 million) investment in the 1,300m Hepin Road. According to statistics from the Tianjin Commerce Committee, both roads achieved a consumer flow of 500,000 on average with average daily consumption reaching 15 million yuan (US$1.875 million), which is three times than that prior to the transformation.   However, such strong performance cannot be achieved anymore. Apart from the lack of services functions, these commercial streets are too long, which creates fatigue on the part of the consumers. Most commercial streets in overseas countries are normally 500 to 600 meters long. This is in into sharp contrast with Chinese commercial streets that are more than 1,000 meters long, which creates obstacles in maintaining a reasonable market operations pattern, prolonging consumer staying time and shopping intentions.   Chinese-built commercial streets need to stay in competitive with new privately held commercial areas to tap the growing domestic consumption boosted by government incentives and rising disposable incomes. According to a National Bureau of Statistics survey on 560,000 Chinese residents, average individual monthly consumption reached 4,228 yuan, an 8% year-on-year increase.