How to manage the buying and selling category?

community
1

Before we tell the problem, I will tell a little about our forum. Our forum already has many categories. There are currently 27 categories.

At present, we plan to open a buying and selling forum, which consists of many categories. Why do we need many categories? Because one of the main factors is, we depend on the topic list plugin, where the topic list plugin still doesn’t support tags. In addition, we also have difficulty if we only use one category, for example the buying and selling category.

For example, the fashion category requires men’s and women’s fashion sub-categories. Inside, it is divided into sub categories of pants, clothes and accessories. Because discourse only allows one level sub category, we plan to create two categories, namely men’s fashion and women’s fashion. This also applies to other types of categories, such as books, electronics and so on.

The question are :

  1. How do you manage good categories for buying and selling forums? Is managing the categories like Amazon the best?

  2. Can we make it in the main forum, which will later become very many categories in it, maybe around 40 categories?

  3. Or do we need to create a new forum and put it in the sub domain? for example store.example.com

  4. If we create a new forum, what are the technical constraints, especially user management

  5. If we create a new forum, does Google consider it a new site or part of the main site? What is the impact on SEO?

We really hope for the input, because we believe that many users here are very experienced in managing a forum

Thank you very much for your attention and help. Sorry if the english is bad, I hope you can understand what we mean.

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2

Hi there,
Is the rest of the forum somehow related to the buying and selling part? E.g. is the main forum for discussing fashion and the marketplace is for selling clothing? If so, I’m not sure what the issue is. Why don’t you just add a Marketplace category with sub-categories for each of the different items?

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3

@HAWK thank you very much for the response

I am sorry if our explanation is unclear. Our forum can be analogous to a university. There are several faculties. Within the faculty there are several majors.

Existing

  • Computer

    • Information Technology
    • Computer Science
    • Software Engineering
    • …and others

  • Economics

    • Accounting
    • Management
    • Business administration
    • …and more

  • Design

    • Fashion
    • Art
    • Film and media
    • …and more

Now, we want make a faculty member marketplace, for example book store and fashion store. Which one is the best for these option,

Option 1

  • Computer (existing)

    • Information Technology
    • Computer Science
    • Software Engineering
    • …and more

  • Marketplace

    • Novel Book
    • Computer Book
    • Law Book
    • Motivational Book
    • Men’s Fashion
    • Women’s fashion
    • and more…

Pros : We just add 1 category
Cons : There will be many sub categories and hard to manage

Option 2

  • Computer (existing)

    • Information Technology
    • Computer Science
    • Software Engineering
    • …and more

  • Men’s Fashion Store

    • Men’s clothes
    • Men’s pants
    • Men’s shoe

  • Women’s fashion Store

    • Women’s clothes
    • Women’s pants
    • Women’s shoe

  • Book Store

    • Novel Book
    • Computer Book
    • Law Book
    • Motivational Book

Pros : Easier to manage
Cons : There will be many categories. We already have a lot categories.

Option 3

Make new forum (marketplace forum) and put it in sub domain. But we are afraid of technical issues.

4

I would go for option 3 with SSO:

  • your existing users can go back and forth without the need of a new account
  • you can use store.example.com as the domain of your store forum
  • you can make it visually appealing and more marketplace-like
  • you can use banners in your existing categories to point to your store
  • you keep your community focused without cluttering the conversation space with unrelated items that many would have to mute if they’re not interested
  • using multisite configuration, there’s no duplication of work for upgrades and maintenance.
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