Could social login streamline the checkout experience?
Fresh Egg senior conversion strategist Luke Hay explains why brands may use social login in future but why offering your customers a guest login could boost user experience and sales.
ASOS is now offering customers the option to sign in through social media sites to buy their goods. Why do you think it is offering this?
ASOS sees the added benefit of learning more about their customers from their social profiles. They'll present it as an easier way for users to buy from them ("no extra passwords – no brain fail"), but it could be that they're really after more data on who their customers are.
Collecting social data on how their customers live their lives will give ASOS insight into who their customers are, which is going to be great for marketing and, potentially, onsite personalisation. This may also help them plan how a customer may act in the future, what type of purchases they will make and when they are likely to make them.
They are also probably looking beyond immediate purchases through the website and are focusing on their long-term relationship with their customers. By engaging with users through social, they will be able to build customer relationships and loyalty.
What benefit might this have for ASOS?
This looks like a long-term plan with ASOS focusing on the lifetime value that they can get from better quality information about their customers, and easier access to their social accounts. The more they know about them, the better they can market to them and engage with them online.
In the short term, this method also makes it easier for users to share details of their purchases with their social networks. By making it as easy as clicking a button, I expect this form of sharing to be one of the measurements of success of this controversial approach.
There are also opportunities that come from the level of access users need to grant ASOS. By signing in with a Twitter account, a user needs to agree to grant the following permissions:
Read Tweets from your timeline
See who you follow, and follow new people
Update your profile
Post Tweets for you
With many people worried about general online security following a number of high profile hacks, do you think some customers may be frightened off by this option?
I think it will be popular with some people, though others may not want to give ASOS access to their accounts.
It's also worth remembering that ASOS appeals to a younger demographic who are more likely to be comfortable social media users. Social log in would be a bigger risk for a more traditional brand with a less socially-savvy target audience. The fact that ASOS is an established and popular online brand will also mean that users are more likely to be willing to jump through hoops to purchase from them than they would be with a less well-known or less respected brands.
Have any other brands offered this before?
Not that I know of, at least not for checkouts. Plenty of websites allow people to log in with their social accounts; it's just the fact that ASOS are using it at the checkout stage that makes this approach stand out.
ASOS doesn't offer a guest checkout option but do customers prefer guest login from a user experience point of view?
This is the big issue for me. From a user experience point of view, people expect to be able to make quick and easy purchases without giving away any more details than they really have to.
Guest checkouts are very popular as they allow people to complete their purchase with just contact, delivery and payment details and no feeling of commitment to a particular retailer.
From a user experience point of view, one of the best options would be to give new customers the choice of logging in with their social account or using a guest checkout. This would remove what many users, myself included, might see as a barrier to buying from ASOS.
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