More than a third of US consumers (40%) prefer social logins to creating a new/guest account on e-commerce sites, according to a new study from Monetate.
Of course this indicates that a majority of consumers prefer creating new accounts, but merchants still cannot afford to ignore social logins altogether.
When looking at the breakdown of which social networks consumers prefer to login with, Facebook came top with 60%.
Yahoo came second with 12%, followed by Twitter (11%), Google (10%) and Linkedin (7%)
Monetate also looked at how social sharing can affect time on site – consumers who comment using a social login spend on average 15mins 35secs on site compared to 5mins for consumers who cannot comment or share using their social identities.
It’s a bit of a stretch to claim that by enabling social logins and comments you will triple the average time spent on site, but this does suggest that there's at least a relationship between socially engaged consumers and time on site.
Reader comments (4)
1:59PM on 22nd March 2012
I am sure - with time - the percentage of twitter will go up and that of Yahoo will further plummet - even below LinkedIn with the way the company is being handled these days!
Senior marketing officer - online at MyScience.co Ltd
2:15PM on 22nd March 2012
Unsuprising that FB is the social log in of choice, as I suspect that those sites that offer a social log in will invariably have FB more often. I've never seen a LinkedIN log in
Senior User Experience Designer at freelance
4:22PM on 23rd March 2012
I think the definition of new/guest account here is muddled. Some sites require users to create an account to make a purchase, but it's been regarded as good practice for years not to require customers to create an account to make a purchase. Of course, "no account required" could be being replaced by social login to give the business a way to continue to connect with a customer, but I think it's a stretch to say customers prefer social login, if the only other choice is creating an account. If "no account required" was included I suspect this picture would be different.
Operations Director at Wilson Cooke Marketing Ltd.
11:26AM on 26th March 2012
Thanks for this, interesting comment where "40% of consumers prefer social log ins over creating a new account"
What are the drawbacks of this - I'm sure there are certain data issues over, for example, who owns that data. Is the ecommerce site allowed to use data that Facebook has clearly parsed over to them for promotional purposes for example? Can the shipping/billing address be saved for future use and if so who "owns" this data, the user, the ecommerce site or Facebook? What about, SagePay tokens, can credit card information be kept, too, with this kind of log in?
What are your thoughts?
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