Social sign-in helps online retailers and publishers learn more about their consumers, without the hassle of filling out forms or registering. A recent study from Sociable Labs reveals that half of US visitors to ecommerce sites are already logged into Facebook – the question is, are they willing to use their Facebook identity (complete with interests, activities and friends) to sign into those ecommerce and other sites?
According to eMarketer, research has shown that “making the registration process easier, and giving users options for signing in with any of several different logins, increases sign-ups and conversions.”
A recent Janrain study – released December 5 – showed that 42% of social media users preferred to log-in to sites via Facebook; Google was next in line with 29%. For mobile social log-in preferences, Facebook was tied with Google at 37%.
When signing into retail sites, nearly half (49%) of social network users preferred to log-in through Facebook.
Social sign-in with Facebook provides a huge boon to retailers, revealing the user’s name, email, location, birth date, gender, friends/contacts, profile photo, interests, and social sharing. This provides retailers with more information about potential customers than any of the other possible networks for log-in mentioned in the study, including Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, MySpace, WindowsLive, AOL, PayPal and Salesforce.
