Building Community to Build Profits

I read an interesting article about customer loyalty by Hilary Mendelsohn on Practical Ecommerce. The article listed a few ecommerce sites that are encouraging customer loyalty through various programs. While the notion that it is more profitable to keep a customer than to attract a new one may not be new to many Yahoo! merchants, I haven’t seen a large number of stores that use one of the simplest and most effective methods of attracting repeat visitors—building a community.

The auction giant eBay is perhaps one of the best known examples of how developing a loyal community, increases activity and thereby revenue per user. The same is true for Yahoo! in that the most active users tend to be the users that are more likely to purchase premium services. The key to community is not just limited to forums or chat rooms, but in a larger sense about engaging the visitor. What can you do to keep shoppers coming back for more?

With this in mind I went hunting for Yahoo! stores that feature community sections and came across duematernity.com. In addition to having a compelling visual design, Due Maternity encourages moms-to-be to interact with the site by offering wish lists, calendars (be sure to check out the jiggy-o-matic), baby name finders, baby astrology, and more.

Due Maternity Community home page

I asked Albert DiPadova of Due Maternity about the benefits and challenges of offering community features.

Why is the community site important to your business?

DM: Because we have so much repeat business our customers really wanted to have their info stored on our site so they didn’t have to keep retyping it. This lead to the development of the community site which provides fun and useful tools to build our customer base.

What end-user tools do you provide on the community site?

DM: The primary reason we built the community pages was to allow our customers to register for their baby showers. Then we added fun and entertaining things to keep them coming back including Baby Astrology, Baby Name Finder and Maternity Clothes Wish List, and Due Date Calculators.

What other community features might you add in the future? Forums? Mailing list?

DM: Our community features reflect our customers request, we will be adding Web2.0 functionality like a forums and blogs. We’ve recently added pod casts that link back to products and we’re looking at emailing abandoned shopping carts with coupon codes.

(Both blogging and forums are offered as part of Yahoo! Web Hosting which is included with every Merchant Solutions account. Yahoo! offers two of the leading professional blogging platforms, Movable Type and WordPress, and also phpBB, an open source bulletin board. Both are easy to set up and manage.)

What Yahoo products did you use to build those tools?

DM: We took advantage of Yahoo! Web Hosting services (already included as part of Merchant Solutions) to build the community site. This allowed us to leverage the power of PHP and MySQL side-by-side with the venerable Yahoo! Store RTML engine.

For example, we utilized PHP and MySQL to store Wish List information, but still rely on RTML for product layout, store publishing and the checkout manager.

Any obstacles you had to specifically overcome? How did you overcome it?

DM: Integration between the Yahoo! Store Editor (RTML) side of things and the PHP/MySQL hosting portion of the sites can be a bit of a challenge. However, the results of doing this effectively are well worth the effort. Having a team that understands both sides of the equation is key.

(Due Maternity worked with Joel and Steve of Practical Data.)

So if you only thought of Yahoo! Web Hosting as one way to build your site, think again about the type of features you can add to bring visitors back to your site. For any customer you can make return on their own, is one less click you need to fight for in search engine results, or one less click you need to pay for with sponsored search.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business