Giving fans a forum can pay off for retailers seeking new ways to build traffic and sales
By Elizabeth Gardner
Though Horse.com’s community forum is not quite one year old, it ranks third in a Google search for “horse forum” and boasts more than 3,000 registered users and nearly 250,000 message posts. Rival HorseForum.com, first on the Google hit list, has only 352 registered users and fewer than 5,000 posts.
Horse.com’s Forum.Horse.com has something else HorseForum.com does not: an Internet retailer owner. Users might not realize this because there’s just one Horse.com banner ad on the forum home page, but PetsUnited LLC operates Forum.Horse.com. PetsUnited runs numerous e-retail sites in the animal kingdom, including Horse.com, Dog.com, Bird.com and Ferret.com.
“The users built their own community,” explains Greg Patterson, COO. “It has been relatively easy to do. People want to share information and talk about their passions. They love talking about themselves and their animals.”
Hundreds of horse lovers routinely are in the forum swapping training and grooming tips, debating the virtues of dirt vs. concrete barn floors, or discussing the finer points of dressage. They also talk about products, including those available at Horse.com.
Tails also are wagging at Forum.Dog.com, a going concern when PetsUnited picked up the Dog.com domain in 2004. It scores first on a Google search of “dog forum.” The dog lovers aren’t as chatty as the horse lovers, but they outnumber them. Forum.Dog.com has almost 24,000 registered users who have posted nearly 260,000 messages. Rival Chazhound.com, which scores second on the Google search, has about 13,500 users and a message count of almost 600,000.
In recent years some e-retailers have added community to content and commerce as components of an overall e-retailing package—but that package is hard to find. Internet retailers complete commerce first; many then add content. The community component, though, usually proves elusive.
Most of the time an online forum and a retail business are not natural partners, contends Hung LeHong, retail analyst and vice president at research firm Gartner Inc. “A successful forum requires a tribe, a strong community,” he says. “And there needs to be passion for the merchandise you’re selling. It’s hard to get something going for a staple product.”
Only 6% of retail sites offer community forums or blogs, the two main instruments of community building, according to “The State of Retailing Online 2006” by Forrester Research Inc. and Shop.org. Retailers with forums are benefiting by turning forum users into regular customers, conducting market research among forum members and goosing their sites’ natural search results because of the high incidence of relevant keywords in posts. E-retailers with successful forums say direct return on investment is difficult to measure, but they don’t doubt it’s there and are more than willing to keep building and enhancing communities.
PetsUnited is continuing to build. Focusing on a different sort of living entity, the retailer soon will launch e-commerce site Garden.com and Forum.Garden.com. The domain is “forum worthy,” says CEO Alex Tabibi, because it’s simple to remember; plus, the subject, like pets, inspires passion and endless discussion.
Primary motivation
After the one-time cost of software and set-up, the forums cost “in the low thousands” per month to maintain, Tabibi says. It’s difficult to measure the impact of forums on the bottom line, but that’s not the primary motivator, he adds.
“We’ll get a lot more traffic from natural search or affiliates,” Patterson says. “The forums are kind of a soft sell. If they talk about a supplement they’re giving their horses, we might get some sales off that.” PetsUnited has staff members prowling the forums to discover new products creating talk among users; management then considers adding items with a buzz to inventory. “We’ve picked up maybe a dozen new products this way,” Patterson says.
Forums have been a key component of Bodybuilding.com since its debut in 2002, says president Ryan DeLuca. “They make sense for our type of visitor,” he explains. “I just love the idea of someone in one country trying to increase their bench press, and someone on the other side of the world telling how they had the same problem and solved it.”
The fitness e-retailer’s forums are beefier than its customers: almost 500,000 registered users and more than 12.5 million posts. Between 2,000 and 3,000 users from across the globe are in the forum at any given time, DeLuca says. As such, forums require a significant hardware investment by Bodybuilding.com, which spends $30,000 every time it adds a server to handle increasing traffic. DeLuca’s annual forums budget is about $100,000 for additional hardware and bandwidth. Otherwise, the forums maintain themselves, with help from 20 volunteer moderators who screen posts, ban troublemakers, douse flame-wars and keep pranksters from posting inappropriate images.
DeLuca hasn’t computed hard return on investment because he says it’s difficult to say whether someone’s forum visit motivated a store visit. “We can measure direct jumps from the forum to the store, but not the bigger picture,” he says. His primary motivation is to continually boost the number of Internet users visiting the forum and e-commerce sites daily. “We prefer if someone becomes an active member of the community before becoming a customer,” he says. “If we can get them to become part of the community, then the more content and help there is, and users come back every day.”
On a different note, Bodybuilding.com’s product suppliers have discovered forums are a valuable source of market research. “A lot of our vendors will assign someone to become a member of the forum and participate,” DeLuca says. They’re not allowed to disguise their identity, which would be bad for the forum’s culture, he adds. The benefit is direct feedback on their products.
Not-so-secret ingredient
“Our users know about the little brands, not just the big ones, and we know if they talk about them on the forum, they’ll always become good sellers,” DeLuca says. One CEO was abashed to discover that the “secret” ingredient for a new supplement was common knowledge on the forum before the supplement hit the market.
BassPro.com, operated by outdoor sports retail chain Bass Pro Shops, offers forums very popular among customers, despite a plethora of competition from players such as BassResource.com and Hunting.net. BassPro.com placed the forums in its Outdoor Library section, which offers comprehensive reference information and original articles.
The strategy is part of the retailer’s emphasis on “entertainment marketing,” says David Seifert, director of operations and direct marketing. In stores the concept takes the form of enormous fish tanks and other outdoor-related spectacles; online, it’s a chance to trade fish tales and equipment suggestions with fellow outdoors enthusiasts.
The forums are six years old and a cornerstone of the library. Regular library visitors generate significant BassPro.com traffic, Seifert says. “They frequent the site almost twice as much as regular shoppers who come in to browse,” he says. “If you’re just a shopping site, people come only when they want to buy something. We’re not just a shopping site—people come for the content. But the retail navigation is available everywhere in case they decide they want to buy something.” BassPro.com spends 20% of its web advertising dollars and uses ad space on its site promoting content.
BassPro.com forums don’t score high on natural search because of search limitations in the merchant’s forum software, Seifert says. The company is switching to an IBM platform that helps search engine spiders better crawl content; that should raise natural search results based on forum content, he adds.
Having seen the power of shopper-generated content, BassPro.com and PetsUnited are launching major forum revamps later this year. BassPro.com plans to integrate forums with customer ratings and reviews so discussions on picking the right equipment, for example, link directly to product reviews of items being discussed.
Further, both retailers plan to transform forums into more elaborate social networking vehicles, with sections to post pictures of the latest catch or videos of pets in training. “We want to be a one-stop shop,” says Patterson of PetsUnited, “for whatever your interests and enthusiasms are.”
Elizabeth Gardner is a Riverside, Ill.-based freelance business writer.
A forums forum
The question: What advice would you offer fellow e-retailers considering adding forums? PetsUnited, Bodybuilding.com and Bass Pro Shops agree on some general guidelines:
— A subject that inspires passion. Wine, yes. Coffee, maybe. Milk, not so much.
— A subject for which there’s plenty to discuss: the subject itself (especially ones involving collecting or connoisseurship); equipment and supplies; and common problems where multiple heads are better than one. Anecdote-friendly subjects (pets, children, sports, travel) also supply fertile discussion ground.
— A sponsor that makes itself scarce. While forum participants are happy to buy stuff, generally they don’t want input from a sponsor. It’s important to avoid both overt commercialism and the temptation to censor negative comments about the retail operation.
— Volunteer moderators to keep discussions on track and avert flame wars. A forum that doesn’t need oversight probably is one that’s not getting enough traffic to justify its existence. Retailers can enlist a strong community member in addition to or instead of an employee.
