As part of my work for PayPal, HeroicMarkup, StrikeIron, and researching PayPal Hacks, I've visited a number of on-line forums where eCommerce is discussed. Here's a summary of what I've learned.
| Site | Quality (Good, Fair, or Poor) [1] | eCommerce forums | Threads for August 2006 | Comments |
| PayPal Developer Community | Good | |||
| PayPalDev | Good | PayPal oriented | ||
| Skype Forums | Poor | Skype for Business | 11 | Lots of talk about about Skype here, but not much of anything about eCommerce. Threads related to eCommerce would likely go in the "Skype for Business" forum. |
| eBay Forums | Fair | Building An eBay Business, Checkout | About 180 (in "building" | eBay-centric (obviously). Large percentage of posts are grousing about eBay policies and problem buyers. |
| WebMaster World | Good | Ecommerce | 90 | No mention of specific services or producsts allowed. |
| Experts Exchange | - | A "pay for advice" site? | ||
| 4 Guys From Rolla | Poor | Mostly a technical forum, geared to ASP. Not much general eCommerce traffic. | ||
| Amazon Web Services Discussion Forums | Poor | No general eCommerce forums | ||
| ASP.net forums | ||||
| GotDotNet | Poor | Web Services forum | 12 | Good technical info, but not much about eCommerce here |
| MSDN Newsgoups | Poor | Internet Server Programming | 3 | Not eCommerce oriented. Fair amount on SOAP |
| sitepoint | Good | eCommerce | about 70 | |
| Google Checkout Forums | - | 0 | Defunct; domain for sale | |
| WebHostingTalk | Good | E-Commerce Discussion | about 130 | Discusses Web hosting from both a consumer and provider perspective. |
| PHP Architect | Fair | "PHP Garage", "XML and Webservices" | 22, 4 | Policy: "[W]e ask that you avoid posting ... [a]dvertisements of any kind. If it looks, sounds or smells like spam, it will be deleted and the poster banned." Nothing eCommerce specific here. |
| Codefixer | Fair | Advanced ASP | 17 | |
| neowin.net | Fair | "Web Backend (scripting and programming)" | 160 | Policy: no sig advertising, no spam (posts not related to the discussion topic), no resurrecting old threads without reason. |
| Perl Monks | Poor | Monks are cool. |