Key considerations for using social login on your ecommerce site

Key Considerations for using Social Login on your eCommerce Site

Have you ever considered the slew of the benefits that social media can bring to your eCommerce website? Higher conversions, higher website engagement, better leads, personalized user experience, extended reach to potential customers, these are all the benefits of a social media integration that can turn your site into a better destination for online shopping.

There are different types of social media integrations which eCommerce store latch on to gain these benefits. Social Login is one such integration which has become so popular lately. Social login is being seen as a mission critical option that all eCommerce sites must provide if they are asking for user registrations.

How social login works?

Social login is used by the sites to allow users to sign in typically using either a plug-in or a widget. By selecting the desired social platform from the plugin or widget, the user simply uses his or her social media credentials to log in using selected services to sign on to the website. This in return eliminates the need for the user/customer to remember login information for multiple websites while providing site owners with uniform user information as provided by the user on the social networking platform.

Sites which provide social login options also provide the traditional online registration option for those users who either want it or do not have any social network account with compatible social login options on the site.

Perks of using Social login on eCommerce sites

Studies say that account registration forms are usually inefficient as many users tend to provide false information, forget their login credentials, or simply deny to fill the form in the first place.

According to a data accumulated by WebHostingBuzz, asking users to enter email addresses, names, and other data, and adding a new burden to remember yet another set of usernames and passwords puts them off, and you might actually be driving them to other sites that don't insist on traditional registration only. Even at the checkout page.

Moreover, a study conducted in 2011 by Janrain and Blue Research says that 77% of customers favored social login option as a means to registration over the traditional online registration methods.

This brings me to the additional benefits of using a social login: 1. It helps in the production of targeted content - Through the social accounts, sites can fetch personal and social data of users that will help in targeting personalized content to the users. This may include the information like user's name, email address, Geo-location, interests, social activities, and friends. However, this information pool can create issues for privacy, that's why many social networking sites provide the users with options to choose what they want to share and what not.

2. Users find it secure enough to control their online identity - One of the biggest reason for why users avoid traditional registration option is the need to provide their personal information. With social login, users can log into different websites with multiple social identities allowing them to have a better control over their online identity.

3. Speeds up the registration process- Social login, in other words, is an account registration process itself. The difference is, websites use the social profile data fetched by social login plugin to register the customer, instead of asking users manually enter their Personally Identifiable Information in registration forms. This, in turn, speeds up the account registration or sign-up process significantly.

4. Helps in getting validated Email data- Most of the social login options like Google and Yahoo provide a pre-validated email data to the websites. Users on these platforms have already verified their email addresses preventing the

user from supplying a fabricated email address during the registration process on your website.

How can you get a social login on your site?

For most of the eCommerce platforms like PrestaShop, OpenCart, and Magento there is no inbuilt solution for the same. However, these three and many other platforms provide the choice to integrate social login feature through a module or plugin installation.

You can purchase and install any of the social login module/plugins according to your eCommerce platform and that's it your website is ready to offer social login options to your customers. Check out how you can integrate multiple social login options on a Magento 2 website.