Creating a GIS application for retail centers in Jeddah city

The aim of this paper is to identify the role of geographical information systems (GIS) in supporting retail planners in monitoring and analyzing retail development and growth. At first, a review about retail planning and its relevant issues is made. Second, GIS is defined together with its applications in retail planning. The third part discusses the created GIS application that is designed for two retail centers in Jeddah city, Saudi Arabia. This application is created to help planners in defining the distribution of retail demand, describing customers profile, analyzing trade areas and modeling retail flows. Two useful models have been produced by this study. One is called market penetration and the other is based on spatial interaction technique. The former is created to examine retail center catchment area, while the latter is used to model the interaction between demand areas and retail centers.