Social Login Extensions - Are they all completely hopeless?

I have been using Opencart for 6 years and it's been brilliant for our business but a while ago I had the bright idea of allowing customers to use their social media accounts to register and login.

The first I checked out was OneAll Social Login where the extension is free but you're actually signing up for 3rd party service costing $10 per month per website. Anyhow I tested it out and can report the Facebook login worked. Unfortunately because it is a 3rd party service, customers see reference to OneAll and not the name of our website they are logging in. Furthermore the Google login failed to work.

More recently I purchased Awesome Login by OZXMOD. It looked great in the demo and was easy to install but one small problem, it didn't work. Given what I know now, I suspect the developers have not updated their code to reflect changes made by both Facebook and Google. Even more annoying is that they don't answer emails or support requests.

Yesterday I purchased TMD's Social Login and I thought that I have finally found something that worked in terms of being able to log into my Opencart website using both Facebook and Google. However my delight was short lived as I soon found that the first and last name fields (brought in from Facebook) didn't then automatically populate into the Billing Details when checking out your first order. The whole point of using a social media account is surely to make registration faster but if customers still have to fill in their names, it actually increases the customer's workload, not reduces it !!!

I've tried demos of other Social Logins and I have been as equally underwelmed this those too. Indeed the vast majority did't actually work and hadn't been updated for at least a couple of years !!!

Therefore I would like to hear anyone who has been using a Social Login extension that they feel positive about.

Since recently Facebook API doesn't return any data, it became completely useless. You now need to approve your application for every possible user detail, only basic data is returned. A lot of other social networks never returned anything useful besides user ID. So it's not about extensions, it's about social networks and their so called "security".

Thanks for replying and your opinion is very interesting.

I am thinking the best method to speed up registration maybe to simply offer address look up. However the 3 Google API based extensions which I looked at this afternoon are currently as "useful" as the social logins. Each seemed beset with problems as none of the demos would populate the "City" field or select the correct "State/Region". CraftyClicks does actually work but could end being quite expensive and the interface is far from perfect in terms of being customer friendly.

And they will NOT populate most of the fields, because they're not returned by social network! It is if you're talking about guests, ordering for the first time on your site. They will have to fill all the fields manually.

thekrotek wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 07, 2018 12:56 am

And they will NOT populate most of the fields, because they're not returned by social network!

I wasn't expecting much but it would have been nice if at least the first name and last name were populated on the registration form.

easistudio wrote: ↑

Wed Nov 07, 2018 1:20 am

I wasn't expecting much but it would have been nice if at least the first name and last name were populated on the registration form.

For the 3rd time, if social network returns first name and last name, I'm pretty sure corresponding fields will be populated. But regarding Facebook you may forget about it, their API is completely useless in this part today. Of course, you can always try to approve you app and ask for more permissions, but I'm giving you 99.9% guarantee, that all you got is "we don't think you need it" response.