Forum addition to retail website

will forums assist in attracting customers

[jasonhlv]

Please excuse me if I have posted this in the wrong place..

I am thinking of adding a forum to my t retail website to attract customers and get better search engine listings. I think this will assist in providing my customers with a place to meet each other, and talk about the products, and their shared experiences with their animals. It will also provide an avenue for them to complain openly about our service, and allow us to solve customer complaints in public.

My question is this. As anyone else tried this, and have they found it to be effective in any way?

[petra]

There is nothing worse than an empty forum for the image of a business. So if you plan to launch a forum, make sure you have the traffic to warrant it.

[rogerd]

Forums can be good for a retail business in several ways. First, they can "humanize" a business, making it more inviting to customers. Second, they can serve as a sort of FAQ/knowledgebase to help answer customer questions, both before and after purchase. Third, they can keep people coming back to your site, where you have the potential for another sale. Finally, they can create content that will bring in additional search traffic.

The downside of all this? As Petra notes, a dead forum will be a huge put-off. You'll have to work to start it up and keep it going. Be aware, too, that not all comments will be positive. When people talk about products, some of the things they say will be critical. If you are going to have a successful forum, you'll have to accept some of this. (Blatant trashing of products, spam, etc. can be safely removed.) Note that Amazon, a very successful retailer to be sure, lets people post negative reviews of products.

Also, it's a good idea to have a clearly stated policy that customer service issues are off-topic and should be handled via another mechanism. You don't want people posting stuff like, "You morons shipped the wrong thing AGAIN! I want may shipping cost refunded, plus compensation for my time! I'm writing the state attorney general right now."

[Hal77]

I have 15 forums on my site and know that it does helps sales of my products. It also takes a lot of work, but it has definitely improved my rankings. Make sure your forum software will enable google to index the posts. The forums have also helped my adsense income.

It's sometimes discouraging that so many of the regular posters do not buy any of my products. On the other hand, the forums have become so popular I can now sell advertising much more easly. And when I use a sticky post which stays near the top to highlight a new product, sales of that product jump.

I've been running forums on the site for many years. A couple years ago, I changed software and with a lot of help was able to bring all the old messages into the new forums. Lots of traffic, lots of content, lots of work.