During the last 6 months, we´ve worked on improving the purchasing process on Blivakker.no, Norway´s largest cosmetics retailer. The improvements are based on findings from usability tests, best practices from leading e-commerce sites and  A/B tests.

The result is a simplified  purchasing process with fewer steps, better design and improved error messages. We´ve  introduced guest checkout and implemented Facebook login. During the same period we  made several adjustments to our web analytics implementation which made it difficult to accurately determine if our efforts have been successful. We are following the results of the different changes closely.

Recently one of our developers commented that Facebook connect caused several issues in regards to our internal systems and processes. He questioned whether it was worth offering customers the ability to log in with Facebook. This inspired us to do an A/B test to compare the checkout process with and without the option to login with Facebook.

Why we implemented Facebook login?

Before we implemented Facebook login, we trawled the web and found several studies discussing the positive and negativ impacts of implementing Facebook login on different websites. We found out that only 30 of the top 500 online retailers had implemented Facebook login and we looked at what Amazon.com considers advantages of FB login.

We chose to implement Facebook login because  research shows that over 50% of shoppers are already logged in to Facebook when they arrive at our site. Our goal as an e-commerce store is to give your customer the ultimate shopping experience and a seamless checkout process. If customers  identify themselves as they arrive in our store, it´s easier to personalize. Since increasingly more customers visit our site from mobile devices, we thought that the Facebook login function would increase our overall sales.

Checkout with or without Facebook login. What works better?

Using Visualwebsiteoptimizer, we set up a simple A/B test in our checkout process. It was quite simple, although we had to tweak the HTML a bit in order to hide the Facebook-components. The test ran for over 7 days and we´ve collected from over 8000 sessions. We wanted to test how Facebook login impacted online sales. To test, we removed Facebook login for 50% of our customers.

Control: With Facebook login

Variation 1: Without Facebook login

Conclusion

The variation without Facebook login outperformed the control by 3%. The test result does not completely convince us that Facebook login is bad, but it clearly shows that the Norwegian market, although heavy Facebook users, may not be ready for social login when shopping online.

Sources:

• Social login buttons aren´t worth it (Mailchimp, Oct 2012)
• Pros and cons of Facebook login for e-commerce (Econsultancy, Jan 2013)
• Only 30 of top 500 online retailers have implemented Facebook login (
• 50% of customers are already logged in when arriving at e-commerce stores (Techcrunch, Nov 2011)
• Best practices for e-commerce sites (Getelastic, Feb 2011)
• Amazon list of FB advantages