Hi everyone. I currently have a website/forum, and want to open an e-commerce site related to that content. I have a question on whether I should create my e-commerce with a new domain or as a part of the exiting site.

For example, say my current website/forum is all about pizza parlors. It's a fairly technical field...You have to know about brick ovens, pizza, dough, electric or gas ovens, cheese, lighting, customer seating.. everything.

I want to create an e-commerce store that SELLS all of that: ovens, pizza supplies, pizza cutters, etc. etc.

If my current site's domain is, for example: pizzaparlortalk . com
Should I open my e-commerce site at: pizzaparlorstore . com ?

Or should I expand pizzaparlortalk . com to include a store?

If I create a new domain and site, I'm interested in how to get traffic from the "forum" site to the store.

Thanks in advance for advice!

Edit: And the website name I gave was an example. My apologies to anyone who owns pizzaparlortalk . com!!!

It depends on how big you see the store getting. It's a tough decision to make but you have to sit down and think where you see the site in 2 years. Do you want to run a forum with a gift shop, or would you like a forum but also have a store that can operate on it's own?

My idea of the store is that it will be bigger than just a gift shop.

Of course things can always change, but my PLAN and GOAL is that in 2 years, the online store will be big.

I like the idea that traffic from the forum can be "funneled" to the store (regardless of if the store has the same domain or not)


I'd like to create a "community" and "one stop shop" for... "pizza parlors"

If you need advice on an oven, go to the forum. Need to buy an oven? Go to the store.

I've never seen a forum with a store before- usually it's the other way around. But maybe it's a good idea if your forum gets lots of traffic and you have good domain authority to jumpstart your ecommerce site.

Yes, I did start the forum first, a couple years ago..and recently have been considering the store.

The forum does have pretty good authority. It ranks in the top 3 for most of the important search phrases I pay attention to.

A forum is a good compliment to a store, right?

A forum is a good compliment to a store, right?

Wrong.

A forum could be a good compliment for USERS of a store.

Thanks for adding your expert perspective. You are right, I need to focus on the users... not just "me" and my site.