Social Integration

An integral aspect of the user experience on an eCommerce website is the user profile function. It offers the users the ability to save personal information, share content, and offers the business the ability to monitor user activity in order to offer more directed and specific suggestions, campaigns and promotions. Though some websites may offer a thorough and large user profile experience, other websites choose to keep it basic, offering users nothing more than ease when ordering. The specific nature of the user profile experience is up to the individual business and what they want to get out of it.

These days, with our multitude of social network profiles, emails, and various other online accounts, the question regarding how to create engaging and easy to use profile experiences is more important than ever. At Desato we are all about staying ahead of trends and making sure that your user has the best shopping experience with ease. Lane Crawford approached us with the idea of social network integration, in short, giving users the choice of signing onto the Lane Crawford site with their social network accounts instead of forcing them to create new profiles. By integrating social network information, the user saves time on creating a new account and can focus on their shopping experience. By having users login with their social network profile, your business has access to a wealth of information which can be used to push products, campaigns, and promotions. The challenge to implementing this function however was to find a way of integrating multiple social networks with one API.

Our solution was to integrate with Gigya and a single API to allow customers to register and login using multiple social network accounts. It greatly reduces the development and maintenance effort to integrate with each social network individually. Moreover, it enables Lane Crawford to analyze social user data and personalize the site behavior for its customers.