Social Logins For E-commerce

Social media logins are a convenient way for shoppers to  use their social media accounts to register and sign in to a website. This integration helps simplify account creation, speed up sign-in and checkout, improve user experience and boost conversion rates.

Benefits of social logins for e-commerce sites

• Directly increases the visitors to your site
• Reduces the percentage of users who exit your website at the registration page
• Can be used to link social media marketing such as Facebook ads etc. to your website and see ROI
• Eliminates the need for customers to remember their logins to make purchases from your site
• Speeds up the process of a purchase and/or account creation, thereby improving conversion rates of visitors to customers
• Increases mobile use of your site by simplifying registrations and checkout
• Easier to promote the business by referral via sharing
• Email verification and password recovery is handled by social network provider
• Standard registration forms vary but most include email, name, phone number & address. Social media would have gathered all of this including gender, DOB, location, interests

Questions a business should ask before implementing social logins

• Does the target customer have social media?
• Does the target customer reside in a region that blocks social media such as China or Cuba?
• What type of online engagement is desired? This directly affects how the additional data gathered by using this feature is used. For example, with social login implemented, the personal information from social media can utilized to direct marketing efforts
• Does the business offer guest checkout?
• Are there specific privacy laws to follow online for user privacy such as GDPR?
• Is it possible to link multiple social network accounts to one customer account?
• Is single sign-on desired or a more strict login criteria?

How does the social login feature work?

Social login for commerce sites can be achieved in just a few steps:

1. To begin the checkout process, the customer selects a social network by clicking on a button which would typically say “Sign in with XYZ platform”
2. The social network provider receives a login request and authenticates the user
3. The customer can proceed with checkout once the social provider has confirmed their identity

This feature relies on OAUTH2.O and OpenID Connect. OAuth 2.0 grants sites the permission to confidentially use social network data for login purposes. OpenID Connect is an authentication protocol that facilitates third-party logins. This allows customers to access sites with login credentials from other websites. Together, these authentication and authorization mechanisms power social logins.

Google sign-in integration

• Create authorization credentials: Any application that uses OAuth 2.0 to access Google APIs must have authorization credentials that identify the application to Google’s OAuth 2.0 server. To create credentials for your site use the following steps:.

1. Go to the Credentials page.
2. Click Create credentials > OAuth client ID.
3. Select the Web application application type
4. Name the OAuth 2.0 client and click Create

After configuration is complete, note down the newly created client ID. The client ID will be required to complete the next steps.

• Load the Google Platform Library: The Google Platform Library must be included on web pages that integrate Google Sign-In.
• Specify the site client ID: Specify the client ID created for the site in the Google Developers Console with the google-signin-client_idmeta element.
• Add a Google Sign-In button: The easiest way to add a Google Sign-In button to a site is to use an automatically rendered sign-in button. With only a few lines of code, a button can be added that automatically configures itself to have the appropriate text, logo, and colors for the sign-in state of the user and the scopes requested. To create a Google Sign-In button that uses the default settings, add a div element with the class g-signin2 to the sign-in page

The social login module is available as an extension for SuiteCommerce and SuiteCommerce Advanced. Businesses using Site Builder along with reference checkout can add this feature to their website. To incorporate social sign-in for Facebook, Twitter and Google platforms into your SuiteCommerce site, reach out to the 79Consulting team of SuiteCommerce Advanced experts.