Customer forum on an ecommerce site, good or bad idea?

[eunaneunan]

Hi, We are an online furniture retailer in Ireland and have been going for about 4 years, there is about 1000 visitors onto the site everyday. We have been thinking of new ways to interact with the customer and build the sites online content and constantly working to improve rankings. Have been toying with the idea of a user/customer forum and was wondering what the general consensus was with that as an idea, I appreciate that there could be negative aspects for the brand and was wondering if anyone had experience of similar and how that was perceived by the user and in what way did people interact with the forum. I assume differently to how they would interact with an "independent" furniture forum. My hope would be that the forum would be used for discussing general home improvements, asking questions relating to the home for community feedback and assistance and other similar home related topics. All thoughts and feed back welcome. Cheers. Eunan.

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Eunan,

I have done this very thing in the past - creating a forum for the ecommerce site that I was working on. I actually put the forum on its own domain and found that it did help increase relevant traffic to my main website. However I found that customers were reluctant to post on this community in comparison with a well known independent forum in the same niche. The one thing I didn't do at the time and think that I should have done learning from experience is inviting customers and others with interests relating to my site to be moderators. By doing this I think that you would help increase some exposure through these sources and also give the forum more of a feel of independent discussion even though it is attached to your business.

One other thing I would say that I think you should consider is the fact that if your forum is on your main site and creates a sudden surge in traffic will your site be able to handle it without causing the whole site to slow down. As we all know there is nothing worse for user experience than a site that is slow and clunky. We also know that this also has an influence on rankings.

[brandonjschwartz]

A forum isn't the best way to improve rankings and there are a number of issues to watch:

First, old content gets pushed to the bottom and there isn't a lot of interlinking that happens, so the older content would eventually lose some of its power. 1,000 hits a day isn't very high, so I wouldn't expect that the surge of new content would be enough to immediately make up for the PageRank depletion on the buried topics. Using a system that has interlinking, creating a dynamic sidebar that pulls random topics and displays them on the page, or creating a static list of highlighted topics might help.

Second, you run duplicate content risks. I've managed two forums in the past, and posters never use the search button. Instead, they'll just ask the same questions over and over again. Communities are tricky; moderating may upset people, so you'll want to be very up-front about your stance on not using the search function to see if a topic was previously raised and you may want to create a sticky topic of frequently asked questions that you update from time to time.

But all in all, a forum isn't a bad idea and would add some dynamics to your site that probably don't exist now. There are work-arounds for some of the ranking issues you might run into; just make sure to put user experience before any potential SERP lift.