Discourse instance supporting entrepreneurs who sell on Amazon

Hi everyone! First time here.

I am a Product Manager working on supporting entrepreneurs worldwide who sell on Amazon. We have over 2M worldwide Sellers who sell products on Amazon. I am working to connect them to each other and to our business teams.

Our Discourse instance has millions of posts with hundreds of thousands of users.

Feedback or recommendations on how you would improve our Forums? I’m all ears.

6 Likes

Impressive forum! An observation about something I noticed in other forums too: when there are lots of categories with names that are more than one word, the two column layout in the hamburger menu is not ideal. I prefer a single column. The menu is something that recently changed in a newer version, maybe it’ll look better when you upgrade.

Here’s an idea (before and after):

9 Likes

Hey Danny,
Happy to help. Can you perhaps outline what your current challenges are or what you think you need to improve on? That will give us some direction for our feedback.

3 Likes

Wow! Great idea. Planning to implement. Thanks

We asked users what the biggest challenges were. If you have a few minutes, please see here for the verbatim posts. They’re more powerful than my summary!

Themes:

  • Privacy
  • Voting
  • Participation from Amazon
  • Reputation
  • Discoverability of content
  • Meetups
4 Likes

Here’s one that should be simple to fix - missing image:

2 Likes

Maybe not so simple. Unless there is explicit permission to use the logo icon they may issue a take down.

Could be… we had that topic not too long ago, but this forum seems to be owned by Amazon. It’s on a subdomain of amazon.com.

3 Likes

@danny_amazon Use a higher resolution logo image - it is not scaling nicely.

Screenshot%20from%202018-10-24%2009-23-54

5 Likes

Noted. Added to my next round of updates.

Replacing the value in the site settings will fix it.

What are your views on adding a “helpful” button? (such as Apple does)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8023051?answerId=32050300022#32050300022

2 Likes

It depends what you are trying to achieve. The like button essentially does the same thing. I wouldn’t add another click unless you specifically need to gather data to somehow improve the user experience.

5 Likes

I know this is an old thread … but REALLY think that would have been a good route.

If nothing else, something other than the :heart: would have been more appropriate on the seller forums.

JMO

3 Likes

It’s already possible to change the :heart: to any emoji or symbol of your choice with a theme component.

Please don’t do that … For your purposes I really believe the only needed one is a “Like.”

  • We saw a lot of Unhelpful/No based on popularity or just dislike of a poster with no accountability

  • If a post is that bad it can be flagged

I feel our forums are somewhat unique and this doesn’t work well there.

JMO

(And hi Danny. I didn’t think you frequented this forum much any more)

3 Likes

One of the challenges I’m working through is the request by users to quickly access a question & answer. In the current experience, this involves scrolling (sometimes among dozens of posts). The mark as solution feature enables this experience, but with low adoption to date. Thoughts here? Love the conversation. Your revival of this post brought me back.

You need this plugin below. It does this.

1 Like

@MarcP … the issue is posters don’t bother to use the Solution button.

Our forum constantly has new users.

  • They often don’t want to go through the learning curve on how the forum works
  • They often don’t want to do more than either gripe or get an answer to their issue

I think the nature of it being a one time event for most leads to the lack of use.

ETA - I am just a poster in the forum. :slight_smile:

I mention some reasons above that I think cause this. I don’t know of a fix at the moment … but I’ll think on it a bit more.

Rob

1 Like

The button is very obvious. Also, the topic starter or Moderators can also do this. The job of admins is to have Moderators help you keep the forum organized. It’s not the job of end users to keep it clean. Although, Discourse tries to ‘train’ users to help keeping the forum nice and clean with its trust level system.

1 Like