Why add a forum to your Shopify store?

Most e-commerce brands run their community on Instagram or in a Facebook group. It works until the day the algorithm changes and reach can drop. Everything your customers wrote then stays locked on a platform you do not own.

A forum hosted on your own store avoids this problem, because the discussions and their history stay on a site you manage.

Your customers already have things to say to each other

If you go through your support inbox, you will see that a good share of the questions repeat, along the lines of “Which size should I pick?”, “Does it work with…?” or “How do I care for…?” In a forum, each one is asked once. Another customer answers and the answer stays visible for everyone who comes next.

You get fewer tickets and your prospects read more credible answers, since they come from other buyers.

Answers that stay on your store

Every discussion stays on your store, with words you would never have thought of writing yourself. Customers phrase their questions in their own terms, the very ones the next customers type into the forum’s search bar.

A store with 200 active discussions has 200 pages of original content that nobody on the team had to write.

What makes the difference with a Facebook group

On a forum installed in your store, you own the data. It lives on your site and not on a third-party platform. No algorithm sorts the posts, so a post is seen by whoever visits the forum.

The link to purchase is direct, since a discussion about a product links to its page on the same site. Customers do not have to create a separate account either, since anyone logged into your Shopify store is already a member of the forum.

Discord and dedicated platforms raise the same questions. We compare them in which online community platform to choose and in Discord marketing for e-commerce brands.

Where do you start?

Three categories are enough at launch (help, photos and experiences, your announcements). Invite your most loyal customers by email first and publish the first topics yourself before you let the conversation start. Every step of the launch is covered in detail in our guide to building a brand community. Then, to get your customers into the habit of coming back, we have gathered ideas for recurring events in our article on community engagement ideas.

To go further, read what user-generated content does for your SEO, our comparison of Shopify forum vs Facebook group vs Discord and the page that presents all the forum features.