The Future of Social Shopping

For a retailer with the ability to mine data, social sign-ons, especially to sites such as Facebook and Twitter, offer quite a lot of additional data and context about customers and shoppers.

Social sign-on, which allows consumers to log in to their Facebook account instead of registering on an ecommerce site, has advantages for users as well, especially in terms of ease of use. Social sign-on is sort of the equivalent of a merchant storing your phone number so when you forget your affinity card while shopping, the retailer can still look up the information.

Social sign-on gives retailers access to much-richer profile information, presumably at a point in time when a shopper is going to make a purchase of some type.

The Future of Social Shopping - eMarketer