nop Business Question: Does having a forum incease growth?

Hi Everyone,

I have a next step or marketing question regarding my nopcommerce store.

My question for those of you who have implemented the forum option in your nopcommerce store.  Or anyone who has some ideas for me for that matter. :-)

When you add a forum to an e-commerce site, are you able to use it to create a community, or does it usually end up being a question/answer forum about things relating to your business?

Here's why I am wondering:

I have an online retail business in the gardening category.  I would like to use the forum to create a garden community to disscuss/answer questions about gardening.  Like http://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/

My fear is that it would end up just being a place for customers to just ask questions about my business... basically a replacement for the contact us page.  Do you think this would be the case for a online retail business?  

I guess there is nothing wrong with that, but my vision for adding a forum would be to create a community that would disscuss/answer questions about gardening not just about my products.  Do you think this is possible?

I would greatly appreciate if people could let me know who have seen forums on e-commerce sites or have enabled the forum on their nopcommerce site.

nopCommerce has a nice forum feature. Its upto you on how you utilize it. And building a community around your business should surely help you increase your e-commerce business grow. I have seen some sites using forum very effectively but at the moment I do not remember any link. But, yes it will definitely help you in long run. The only thing is that you need to monitor and moderate it.

jariwalakrunal wrote:

Thanks Krunal!

I really appreciate you being willing to give me some feedback and pointers on this.  I will have to try it and see how it goes.  My plan is that if I can get a lot of questions/discussions on my forum, that are all indexed in Google, it with help drive traffic to my site.

Do you have website on the internet at the moment?

JonNopper wrote:
Hi,

Yes I do, I have had this online business for a little over a year.  I guess I am just looking for ways to speed up growth. :-)  

I am only getting a little over 1000 visitors a month at the moment.  Most of the people coming to my website are coming through google.  

My idea is that if I could get an online community going through adding a forum it would help people run across my website when searching in google.  If someone asked a question or had a discussion on my forum relating to gardening, then when others searched on the same topic in google I would have a chance of coming up.  At least that is the plan. :-)

Regards,

Tim

It certainly can't do any harm to have a forum on your site. Something in line with a knowledge base would be useful for budding gardeners and more experienced ones ought to contribute towards it.
If I were looking to buy anything to do with gardening on the internet I would hope to find plenty of good advice and discussions; what works for one person does not always work for another - encourage customers to post and share their experiences to build a knowledge base!