It’s a little like the chicken and the egg, except that us e-commerce folk have to decide: allow consumers to purchase incognito, or force them to create an account before they check out? The fear for the latter is that those consumers really will check out, and not in the sense of handing you money; the fear for the former is that you will be left after one purchase, forgotten and dataless.
With the advent of the social age, this choice is neatly solved. Montetate‘s infographic titles it this way: Use social login to avoid shopping cart disruption. Neat. Solved.
According to the graphic, two-thirds of Internet users have at least one social login of some kind. So, of course, traditional login options are still important, and giving the consumer choices on how they want to shop will help you connect with them in the way they want to be connected. The data in the infographic states that less than half (40 percent) of consumers prefer to log in with some kind of social account, as opposed to registering for a new account. But 40 percent is a significant number, and projections for anything social always seem to be on the rise.
In fact, there are more benefits to social logins than simply avoiding the gamble of whether you can waltz your customers through the registering process or not. The majority of consumers read product reviews (68 percent) and provide product feedback (50 percent) through social sites. Also of note: consumers who interact with e-commerce websites through social logins spend, on average, twice as much time on websites as consumers who are not logged in socially. There’s the real chicken-and-egg dilemma: do socially logged-in consumers spend more time on websites because they can log in with said social account, or do they log in socially because they are more prone to be active and connected online?
View the infographic at monetate.com.
