5 Best Forum Apps For Shopify
The best Shopify stores don’t just sell lots of products to their customers. They interact with them, build relationships, engage them and provide opportunities to interact with other customers.
As shopping and ecommerce have taken to the social channels, it’s natural for shoppers to want to discuss purchases, ask questions, get answers, provide feedback and just chat.
More Shopify stores are now providing forums where customers and members can do this without even leaving the store.
Customers are already social beings. They want to be heard and chat about your products and services and ask questions. By creating a forum, you enable this from within your shop, encouraging customers to stay on your site and providing a base for your customer support operations.
This helps to build relationships and loyalty and often also provides an SEO boost that can drive more organic traffic to your store.
But it’s not easy to achieve a successful forum – especially if you have international customers that require multilingual support. Many store owners don’t know where to start.
Like many things Shopify, it starts with an app from the Shopify app store.
Here we look at the top five Shopify forum apps (in no particular order), noting what they do best, pricing, and how popular they are amongst users.
PeerBoard Forum & Community
PeerBoard by Circles Collective is one of the best-reviewed and advanced-feature forum apps for Shopify. It can help you embed a white-label community in your store that builds trust and traffic.
The automation features of PeerBoard mean that you won’t have to spend hours moderating or administering the forum. That’s time you don’t have so it’s great that much of the work can be done for you.
A free version with unlimited usage is available so that you can check it out before paying for more advanced features if necessary.
Price: Free plan available. $29/month for Starter Plan. $79/month for Pro Plan.
Free Trial? No
Average Shopify Rating (out of 5 stars): 4.8 (5 reviews)
Main pros:
- Enables embedded, white-label communities (public or private)
- Allows private member-only subgroups with access privileges and automated community management (paid versions)
- Provides a search boost with an SEO-friendly setup that allows customers to generate new content – driving organic traffic to your store or blog
- Aids customer support with a knowledge base for customers to find answers to questions
- Helps generate new leads and identify affiliates through forum interactions
- Provides real-time threads or blog posts to provide info
- Allows you to get customer feedback that helps you develop products and direction for your brand
- Gather customer input into new ideas
- Provide badges and rewards for helpful customers
- Rich user profiles are available
- Easy to set up and use – no coding required
- Customizable with your own branding (paid versions)
- Support for 15 languages
- Free version with unlimited usage
Any cons?
- Lack of reviews on Shopify
- Pricing is higher than other apps reviewed here
Xenforum
Xenforum by app1pro provides a professional forum at a very reasonable monthly fee that should be within the reach of most Shopify store owners.
Whether you need to improve customer support, run product pre-sales Q&As, facilitate general discussions, offer promotions/discounts or allow private discussion groups in related topics, Xenforum helps you achieve it with a well-established forum app.
Though there is no free version available, the 7-day free trial allows you to try before you buy.
Price: $14/month for Basic Plan (up to 1,000 users) and $19/month for Pro Plan.
Free Trial? Yes – 7-day free trial
Average Shopify Rating (out of 5 stars): 4.6 (10 reviews)
Main pros:
- Build a network of loyal customers by creating a professional forum
- Forum members can create/reply to topics using a WYSIWYG editor, mention, search, like and upload images
- Easy to edit profiles and set notifications for users
- Easy to manage topics/posts and users from the admin page or storefront view
- Designed for easy mobile and desktop use
- Customizable colors, menus, CSS and JS
- SEO-friendly – helps you increase organic traffic to your store
- Easy to install and use
- Pro plan includes email service
- Low monthly fees
Any cons?
- No free version
- Short free trial (7 days only)
Social King
Social King by the team at King Commerce is another of the best-review forum apps on the Shopify app store. It provides customers with a platform to blog, connect, share, and learn – all from within your store and under the umbrella of your brand.
Store owners can promote products, encourage conversations and “buzz” and gather important shopper feedback.
Social King is a low-priced option that should suit smaller store owners who do not need some of the more advanced features of other apps reviewed here.
Price: $4.99/month
Free Trial? Yes – 15-day free trial
Average Shopify Rating (out of 5 stars): 4.5 (15 reviews)
Main pros:
- Provides a platform for customer blogging, connecting, sharing, and learning
- Shoppers can create user profiles with images, create and edit posts, comment, and react with emojis
- Can upload images and embed videos
- Easy to manage/administer with tags and moderate user-generated posts
- Improves SEO with regular new content posted on your store
- SEO sitemap included – helps generate more organic traffic
- Customizable look and feel to match your theme/brand
- Integrates with existing plugins on community pages
- Supports 12 different languages
- Supports guest blogging – great for building business partnerships and user-generated content
- Includes a member news feed
- Mobile and email notifications sent to shoppers about posts
- Responsive support team
- Simple and reasonable pricing
Any cons?
- Free plan is only available for 15 days
- A few technical problems with formatting text in posts according to users
Shopicial – Social Forum
The Shopicial – Social Forum app is another one by the team at app1pro, who designed the Xenforum app and several other Shopify apps.
It is a more recent addition to the Shopify app store than Xenforum and, while it shares many of the same features, it should be noted that it is less well-reviewed by Shopify merchants than its older brother.
However, it does allow merchants to create paid forums – introducing an extra monetization opportunity for Shopify store owners.
Price: $14/month for Basic Plan (up to 1,000 users) and $29/month for Standard Plan (up to 2,000 users – excess users $12/month per 1,000). Special pricing is available for large forums over 10K/100K users.
Free Trial? Yes – 7-day free trial
Average Shopify Rating (out of 5 stars): 3.9 (24 reviews)
Main pros:
- Creates a professional forum to help build your network
- Supports paid forums with one-time or recurring membership fees
- Forum members can create/reply to topics using a WYSIWYG editor, mention, search, like and upload images
- Multiple post types including image and video
- Easy to edit profiles and set notifications for users
- Easy to manage topics/posts and users from the admin page or storefront view
- Designed for easy mobile and desktop use
- Customizable colors, menus, CSS and JS
- SEO-friendly – helps you increase organic traffic to your store
- Easy to install and use
- Pro plan includes email service
- Low monthly fees
Any cons?
- Some historical issues with paid social ad conflicts after uninstalling – but recent reviews suggest it has been fixed
- No free version
- Short free trial (7 days only)
Community Builder
Community Builder is a Shopify forum app from AppRebel. It’s a little different from the other apps reviewed here in that it is geared totally towards Facebook forums.
This app is all about adding another “touchpoint” with customers to better understand and connect with them. It allows you to discuss products and help out with customer queries on Facebook, growing relationships and building a loyal following.
However, it is done on Facebook rather than directly from your store. This may work well if you have a large customer base of avid Facebook users who won’t hesitate to join a Facebook-based forum (there are currently over 10 million groups).
Price: $5/month
Free Trial? Yes – 10-day free trial
Average Shopify Rating (out of 5 stars): 5.0 (2 reviews)
Main pros:
- Displays a widget to invite customers to join your Facebook community
- Widget displayed from the Order Confirmation page and after checkout
- Create a new channel for customers to ask questions and interact with you
- Can create awareness of offers and gather customer opinion/feedback
- Conduct simple-to-respond-to surveys
- Generate new leads from other Facebook users
- Demonstrate additional value for customers
- Customizable with your own text and description
- Simple to install and set up an instant Facebook group community
- Easy-to-use interface
Any cons?
- Lack of reviews from Shopify merchants
- Takes users off your store (to Facebook)
Build customer loyalty through Shopify forum app interactions
Ecommerce works best when you and your customers are in tune with each other. You know what their questions, concerns, and expectations are and they know what you can provide and where they can go for immediate help.
Sometimes, customers can even provide valuable input into new product development or brand issues that come up – if you allow them to.
Including a forum in your store provides a channel that taps into the social expectations of shoppers and satisfies their need to voice opinions and be heard. In doing so, you build a more loyal and trusting customer base. That translates directly to sales.
Check out a Shopify forum app or two from our review and let us know how you go.
