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Spring 12 Release

Bill Piwonka — Wed, 30 May 2012 01:05:45 +0000

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a product update meeting in which our rock-star product teams give an update on the various projects they’re working on. In these meetings we review four different “buckets” for the different projects. 1) Those that are planned, but not yet started, 2) Work in Process, 3) in QA and 4) Released.

What struck me as really exciting that day were just how many items were in the final two buckets – capabilities we were about to release to our customers.

Well, these capabilities are now available, and there should be something for just about everyone in this list:

Social Commerce Extensions
Retailers can now easily incorporate social login, social sharing and social profile data collection and storage within their Demandware or Magento-based eCommerce sites using the new Janrain eCommerce Connectors.
Deeper Analytics
Customers can accomplish deeper segmentation of users into online buyers and registered visitors by correlating social attributes and demographic info with onsite activity including content viewed, time spent on site and conversions using the new Janrain Analytics Connector for Adobe SiteCatalyst. Retailers can leverage additional intelligence offered by social profile and social graph data to target their users with the right set of products and content.
Improved Email Targeting
Brands can leverage rich social and traditional user profile data stored in Janrain Capture to improve segmentation, targeting and relevance of email campaigns through the new Janrain Email Connector for ExactTarget.
Government support
Janrain now supports FICAM-compliant identities for State and Federal Governments as well as for regulated industries.
Expanded Identity Provider support
In this release, Janrain has added Chinese identity providers Sina Weibo and RenRen, Germany-based SoundCloud and US-based Tumblr.

We also announced new partnerships with 500friends, Certona and GraphicMail. All in all, a tremendous amount of work across our entire company has gone into this release.

(PS – I wasn’t 100% honest up above – my excitement in that meeting was also due to what was in the first two buckets! We’ve got some really cool stuff coming soon…)

WordPress 3.3 and Janrain Capture for Magento Plugins Here in Time for the Holidays

Eric Rickson — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:12:42 +0000

We have recently made updates and an addition to our lineup of plugins – Janrain Engage for WordPress 3.3 and Janrain Capture for Magento.

Janrain Engage for Sonny

WordPress 3.3 Sonny, launched earlier this month and we have since released a new version of our Janrain Engage for WordPress plugin including our latest social login widget and some cool new features.

Highlighted new features

Supports WordPress version 3.3
Updated with latest Janrain Social Login Widget
See which Social Providers people are logging in with on your site. This information is included in the Users section of your WordPress Dashboard.
Added new WordPress shortcodes to easily personalize content that is different for visitors that are and aren’t logged into the site.

Janrain Capture for Magento Extension Released

Now it is even easier to integrate Janrain’s hosted registration into your sites built using the Magento platform. Our latest Janrain Capture for Magento Extension integrates seamlessly with the Janrain Engage plugin (social login and social sharing) we released earlier in 2011.

Centralized and hosted user profile database
Integrated with Janrain Engage to sign in with a variety of social identity providers
Supports single sign-on

Please note that you need to license Janrain Capture to use this extension.

Day 1: Innovate Conference Brings the Unveiling of PayPal Access

Gina Rau — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 13:11:20 +0000

More than 3,000 people were on hand Wednesday in San Francisco to see the official unveiling of X.commerce at the Innovate Developer Conference. Now in its third year, Innovate has evolved quickly from a developer conference put on by eBay’s PayPal unit to a broader event featuring X.commerce, which unifies the commerce tools and technology platforms of eBay, PayPal, Magento, Milo and other eBay companies for developers and merchants.

During the keynote, X.commerce announced the launch of its commerce identity platform PayPal Access. PayPal Access opens the door to increased personalization and a streamlined checkout as consumers can use their PayPal account to login to 3rd party sites. This provides additional convenience for mobile shoppers where it reduces the need to type your shipping and billing addresses. Janrain announced yesterday that any website can now offer its users PayPal Access via Janrain Engage. Janrain has worked closely with PayPal on a tight integration that enables merchants to quickly install PayPal Access while also providing the tools to fine tune what personal data is requested from shoppers.

eBay has been aggressive in its acquisitions this past year, with Magento, GSI Commerce, Zong and Milo taking on new roles as X.commerce looks to build the full commerce stack. While Magento has been open from the beginning, Milo announced a new API Wednesday that opens up their real-time pricing and local product availability to 3rd party platforms. Commerce sites offering value-added services like local product availability are better positioned to get shoppers to login upfront with tools like PayPal Access if the benefit is a more personalized shopping experience.

Quick chat with Tim Domke of X.commerce about Janrain’s partnership and the new, improved integration with PayPal.

Looking forward to more from X.commerce as Innovate opens for day 2. Stop by and see us if you’re here.

Is the Future of Social Commerce on Facebook?

Michael Olson — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 16:45:54 +0000

Facebook’s explosive growth from internet users and brands has led many pundits to question whether it will become the hub of commerce for retailers. Commerce on Facebook is alluring because it enables companies to harness social capital. Retailers are eager to tap into the tremendous word-of-mouth potential of fans liking products, making purchases, and sharing those purchases with friends. Social media strategists often tell their clients to “fish where the fish are”, which has caused several retailers to open Facebook storefronts.

Last fall, Procter & Gamble made a splash by launching a direct-to-consumer sales channel on Facebook for its Pampers brand. While certainly not the first retail brand to extend its eCommerce presence to Facebook, P&G’s initiative still attracted a media blitz, and the idea was praised for its ability to induce impulse purchasing. However, P&G actually outsourced the logistics to Amazon Webstore. Consumers could browse products and add to their shopping cart while on Facebook, but the checkout process actually lived within Amazon’s borders.

Why wasn’t the entire experience contained within Facebook? The reason may be due to analytics. Facebook Insights provides valuable data on interactions and engagement metrics, such as number of impressions, likes and comments. But Facebook’s analytics engine simply cannot replicate the breadth and depth of information available from dedicated analytics platforms like Coremetrics or Omniture, or eCommerce platforms such as Demandware, GSI Commerce and Magento.

These platforms deliver rich clickstream data, which lets retailers track browsing behavior and determine methods to optimize the purchase funnel. Traditional analytics platforms also offer intelligence about which marketing programs (email, search, PPC, social or affiliates) are most effective at driving sales. Facebook Insights is great for measuring engagement, but may not yet provide the level of actionable data required for commerce.

A category of promising technology vendors has emerged to address these concerns by making it easier for retailers to integrate Facebook storefronts and track consumer behaviors. And there are encouraging case studies from companies that have sprouted complementary sales channels directly on Facebook, such as JC Penney and 1-800 Flowers. But because many storefronts use iFrames to serve product content, they are often SEO black holes that do not receive much love from the search engines. Given that 25-35% of traffic to large eCommerce sites is organic search, the lack of search engine discoverability for product content on Facebook is a concern.

So, clearly there is value in maintaining a strong commerce component under your roof. Perhaps Ethan Beard, Facebook’s Director of Platform Marketing, said it best last December when he remarked, “We’re not trying to recreate the Internet on Facebook. In fact, I spend most of my time working with people to socialize the web outside of our site.”

David Fisch, Director of Business Development at Facebook, echoed Beard when he added, “the storefronts are really only one piece, and really a pretty small piece, of the burgeoning area of social commerce. Our interest isn’t in getting people to create tabs where people can shop but allowing consumers to shop wherever they are and helping them discover products through their friends.”

Fortunately, with the help of tools like those we provide at Janrain, the benefits of social shopping can be extended to a retailer’s corporate site. Here are three ways for retailers to leverage the power of Facebook commerce on their site to grow conversions and sales.

Social Sharing

Social sharing taps peer recommendations to drive qualified traffic to product pages and conversion points on your eCommerce site. It lets consumers promote their purchases, product reviews, or other content from your site to their friends on multiple social networks. This blends the benefits of word-of-mouth marketing and brand advocacy to drive qualified new referral traffic to your site. Janrain customers generate an average of 13 new referral visitors to their site for each piece of shared content.

Social sharing also helps retailers and brands circumvent the challenges of news feed optimization. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm is designed to promote relevance by favoring news feed posts from friends with whom you frequently interact. While your brand page may have plenty of fans and likes, your Facebook posts could get lost in the news feed unless consumers frequently interact with your messages or visit your page.

Peer-to-peer sharing is different because it leverages the high affinity scores that your consumers already have with their friends. As a result, posts that originate from consumers may be more likely to filter to the top of the news feed than those from your brand. In essence, more impressions lead to more referrals and ultimately, increased sales.

Incorporate Friends and Social Graphs

One reason retailers turn to Facebook is to replicate the shopping mall experience online – where consumers flock to stores with their friends to browse and purchase products. But this type of social shopping is also possible directly on a retailer’s site after enabling social login.

When consumers sign-up on retail sites with their Facebook identity, they can choose to grant access to their member profile data and friends lists. This social graph data opens the door to optimize social shopping on your site. Here are a few ways your customers can incorporate their Facebook friends into the shopping experience:

Filter product listings or reviews to prominently display content that friends have recommended. In other words, provide a window into purchases, product reviews and activities from friends.
Invite Facebook friends directly to check out a particular product or visit the site.
Recommend gift ideas for Facebook friends based on their birthday or interests. See the image below for an example.

Social Ads

Targeted social ads are another effective traffic-driver to product pages and conversion points on your site. Because Facebook now accounts for about 12% of all time spent online in the U.S., it is an incredibly potent channel for advertisers.

Facebook advertising works for retailers partially because of the social network’s scale, but also because Facebook can target relevant ads based on a consumer’s demographics or interests. If I sell athletic shoes, I’m going to generate more conversions and a greater return on my advertising investment by targeting Facebook users who are interested in running.

Many retail brands use Facebook ads to drive traffic to their brand pages on the social network. While this is an effective tactic if the goal is to build community on Facebook, your product pages or custom splash pages should be the destination if revenue is the immediate objective.

Facebook has the potential to become a viable direct selling channel for retailers. But until it evolves to support the deep level of analytics, SEO and merchandising tactics that retailers already employ on their corporate sites, it is perhaps best leveraged as a complementary sales channel, a branding and engagement tool, and a traffic-driver to your eCommerce site. With the help of the ideas described above, your site can remain as the hearth of your social commerce strategy.

Janrain Social Login & Sharing Now Available for your Magento eCommerce Platform

Katie Keenan — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 12:21:43 +0000

Consumers would prefer to use social login for speedier checkouts, receiving targeted promotions and a more personalized online experience based on their social profile. And retailers are focused on improving conversion rates and reducing shopping cart abandonment. If both merchants and consumers want the same set of tools, what is the hold up? Why aren’t more retailers integrating social into the shopping cart experience? The answer lies in the need for turnkey integrations with eCommerce platforms. No retailer wants to hand stitch social into their platforms.

That’s where Janrain comes in. Starting today, Janrain Engage social login and sharing is available for the Magento eCommerce platform.

The Magento eCommerce platform serves over 90,000 merchants and drives over $25 billion in transactions. Janrain Engage shopping cart extension for Magento supports rapid registration using social identities from Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Aol, Twitter and up to 12 others. It also enables users to share purchases and SKUs with their social graph driving qualified referral traffic to the online store. Additionally, users can link multiple social identities to a single Magento account, providing retailers with a 360^o view of their users with minimal effort.

This plugin is available for all levels of Janrain Engage and can be downloaded from the Magento Connect marketplace.

We have put together a sample storefront to showcase the user experience and have provided documentation to help get you started on your installation.

Integrating social into your ecommerce site has never been easier. Please give it a try and let us know what you think.

Screenshots: