Folder or subdomain for new e-commerce addition

[ejovi]

Our main content site has 5K pieces of unique content all targeting our market.

We are planning to add e-commerce as a source monetizing our audience.

Should we place the new commerce platform within a subdirectory or subdomain?

The layout we are considering is...

shop name: Brand Name Market

http://www.brandname.com/market/

http://market.brandname.com

I am also considering something like:

http://www.brandname.com/market/ aggregating product details and content from http://market.brandname.com/ with rel= back to the subdomain if possible.

[matbennett]

Ideally I would use the /market/ directory over a sub directory.  That would allow the store to benefit from the authority of the existing site, rather than starting afresh on a new sub-domain.

Some software combinations could make that tricky, but in most cases it should be fine.  If it does get tricky there is also a work around where you can have content on a subdomain served from a directly url using a reverse proxy.  Messy though.

The final option seems unnecessarily complicated to me.  I'm not sure what you are trying to achieve there.