A shopping center is a retail building or complex where several stores are joined to form a destination place for shoppers. Shopping centers take many different forms: they may be automobile-oriented (e.g. strip malls) or pedestrian-oriented; they can be open campuses or clusters arranged around a vertical atrium. They can be anchored by supermarkets or department stores, or they can be groups of small specialty shops.

The buildings in a shopping center must be united by a common development plan. In general a city's downtown or a retail-intensive district does not qualify as a shopping center, unless special modifications are made to it such as the formation of a pedestrian mall by closing a street. Specially designated shopping districts without physical modification in an urban retail area generally do not count as shopping centers.

The common development plan unites the stores into one shopping destination. An ordinary concentration of separate shops does not qualify solely through density or a designated district name.