Some commericial concerns of Amazon's community forums: The case of the Kindle

Ecommerce consumers have many platforms for discussing products, one of which is the online product forum. These forums exist across the web on a variety of ecommerce shopping sites, including Amazon.com. However, the value of an online product forum for consumers, ecommerce, or the shopping site business is unclear. In this research, we examine 1,027 threads and 12,467 posts from the Amazon Kindle Forum, which is Amazon's most active product forum. We use text analytics techniques to categorize the social media posts according to phases of buying decision process, simplified into pre-purchase and post-purchase activity. We use the metric of post helpfulness rating to measure the post value to the customer. Our analysis shows that customers primarily use the Kindle Forum for post-purchase activity. In addition, customers appear to find embedded links particularly helpful in the forum. Activity in the forum is related to the release dates of different Kindle models. Finally, results show that the forum can be used to identify customer complaints and product issues, so online discussion forums are a valuable tool for customer relationship management. The implications of the findings are that ecommerce companies could benefit from providing greater post-purchase customer support in their product forums.