Boom! We found the Electronics Market. It’s the Shanghai SEG Electronics Market, situated at 668 East Beijing Road (close to Zhejiang Road). Click Here for the Map.

As mentioned previously, we were gutted that had we just walked in the opposite direction yesterday we would have found it straight away, but either way we found it and it was amazing!

We were dropped off at Zhejiang Road where we first looked inside a large Hardware Mall over the road…

This was similar to what we’d seen before, but a lot more organised.

Again it was incredible to see this stuff, but not what we came for 🙂 We crossed over the road and found it…

It looks like a hotel on the outside, but once inside it was like being in geek heaven! There’s components wall to wall…

Each stall seemed to specialize in certain areas: they would either sell one type of product or one selection of products. It was common to see stalls that nothing but LEDs, 7-segment displays and LCD Displays. You’d get one that would sell just connectors and displays…

Another just solder…

We even managed to find one that sold nothing but transformers…

Every stall was either an actual shop around the outside or a set of displays creating an enclosure just in the middle of the room (these little enclosures formed the aisles).

The whole place is busy and it’s hard to tell who works at the stalls and who’s shopping. There weren’t really many consumer electronics but every now and then you’d see a stall selling some stuff among their stock. It’s easy to get lost and incredibly easy to forget which sections you’ve already been in but we did manage to find a floor plan that showed there being five floors…

Regardless of the incomprehensible floor plan, we managed to find more…

Yes there were 9 floors in total including the basement (for some reason the basement had been removed from the floor plan)! However the shops began to reduce in numbers as you went up – the basement and the first three floors are the only really interesting areas. (Oh and yes the entire thing was devoted to electronics).

Each floor seemed to be separated into 4-6 large sections, each section holding anywhere between 30 and 50 stalls. The range of electronics is very diverse but like any market in Shanghai, many stalls were selling the same things.

Pretty much no one there speaks English but with a pen and paper you can get across what you want. Haggling wasn’t like it is in most places since this isn’t a place for tourists; most places were shocked when you asked for only one of something as they are expecting to supply you with hundreds-thousands of whatever they’re selling. None the less it’s fun to try talking to these people, at one point we had a guy ring up his mate to come and translate…we walked away happily with some nice LCD displays.

Overall it’s an amazing place! The stalls there seem to be relatively big suppliers (not Farnell or Mouser big, but still): I only say this because they had so much stock, all packaged up and boxed ready to be shipped, not to mention how they found it weird that we were only asking for one or two items.

For a hobbyist it’s a truly remarkable experience, even if you don’t buy anything. Unfortunately we’re not here for that long otherwise it’d be amazing to go down to Shenzhen (which seems to be the home of electronics markets).

We went for dinner afterward and of course it wouldn’t be a truly British trip if we didn’t choose the comfortable option over the not so comfortable…