Older research

Research from 2012 / 2013 reveals that:

• 86% of people are bothered when needing to create new accounts on websites.
• 92% of users have left a website instead of resetting or recovering their login. 31% do so frequently.
• 60% of shoppers are more likely to use social login on mobile
• 64% of millennials use social login avoid spending time filling out a registration form. 45% do it to avoid remembering another username and password.
• 77% say that social login is a good solution.

 

Market share

And as of 2016, Facebook had 53% of all social logins, and Google+ 44.8%. I assume that the Google+ share went down since.

 

Pitfalls and trends

That said, there are pitfalls to using social login.

It relies on third parties, such as Facebook. And if that third party loses credibility due to security issues for example, then your shoppers might trust your store less. It also has been said to ‘cheapen’ the experience.

Potentially poor adoption – MailChimp did an experiment with social login, and found that only 3.4% of users actually made use of it.

In this recent episode of the Marketing School podcast (minute 6), Neil Patel says this about social login:

‘We used to go so many more conversions when we’d just have people sign up with a Google authentication or Facebook authentication. But we’ve been testing in 2019 the removal of that stuff and people fill out all the forms manually. Even though it’s more work for them, we’re seeing our signups and checkouts drastically increase due to the fact that they feel more secure and you have less of their data.’

In Inflow’s conversion optimization checklist, they observed that social login is trending down, as people lost trust and are more concerned about sharing their information.

 

Still worth testing

So this is definitely something to test, if you can.

 

I looked at major brands

About 16% of the stores I looked are offering social login.