Online retailers have long tried to get consumers to register with an e-mail and password on their web sites. But as e-commerce has grown more popular, customers have grown weary of entering their personal data over and over at new sites.

“It can be a six- to seven-step process to sign-up at some places,” says Pete Mauro, head of product management at Savings.com, a service that offers coupons and deals at thousands of online stores. He says most sites ask for an e-mail address and a password, but many go on to ask about interests such as music tastes and hobbies. “People say, ‘Oh God, I have to register at another site.’ You get a lot of abandonment.”

This week, software provider JanRain announced that Savings.com, Sears, Diesel and RedPlum were the latest e-commerce sites to deploy a system that lets shoppers use the log-in and personal information they have provided to popular social networking sites or e-mail providers to register in one click at these retail sites.

A consumer visiting the registration page on these sites is shown an array of icons from such popular web destinations as Facebook, Google and Yahoo. If they have an account with any of the listed icons, they can complete their registration in one click using the information they have provided through the other site.

Mauro says Savings.com has doubled its sign-up rate since implementing the feature. “It really lowers the barriers for a lot of people,” he says.

JanRain was founded in 2005, but e-commerce sites have been slow to pick up this technology, says Brian Kissel, JanRain’s chief executive officer. Many of the early adopters were content providers, such as online newspapers, that had trouble getting accurate registrations from their readers. Many users, says Kissel, were so anxious to get to an article that they just fabricated quick online identities whenever prompted to register, says Kissel. But with JanRain, visitors could quickly register with their Google or other accounts. “If you as a consumer have built that as a primary account you use, the information is likely to be valid,” Kissel says.

In the past six months, online retailers have increasingly adopted JanRain’s service, Kissel says. Kissel believes many have taken note of the rapid growth of social media sites like Facebook, which claims 425 million active users, and want to make it easier for Facebook users to register at their stores. If, for example, a Sears visitor that registered with her Facebook identity writes a positive product review, the store can send a message that asks her to publish it on Facebook. “You’re converting users on your site to advocates on the web,” Kissel says.

Additionally, the number of sites that require a consumer to register have grown, as have their members. A few years ago, security service VeriSign Inc., AOL and several others had perhaps 20 million users, Kissel says. But today there are more than a dozen providers, including giants like Google and Facebook, with a total of about 1.5 billion registered users, he says. It’s very likely that all of an e-retailers’ customers have registered with at least one such site today, he says.

JanRain’s software-as-a-service program called RPX allows retailers to integrate all of their customers’ information from these sites. Several of those sites have proprietary formats, and each collects different information from the user. JanRain aggregates the data and helps web site operators integrate it into their data management systems so that they can use the information for marketing to registered customers.

JanRain customers do not have to install any software on their servers beyond a few lines of JavaScript on their web pages, the company says. Customers configure RPX from a web-based control panel, which generates the custom JavaScript. JanRain charges retailers a yearly subscription rate that starts at 10 cents per year per user, or about $1,000 a year for a store with 10,000 regular users. Stores with more customers can negotiate a lower subscription rate.

To implement the JanRain system, Savings.com had to change its user interface and the sign-up process, mostly to accommodate all the new icons on the registration page, but the process was fairly quick.

“My engineering team worked with them for about three weeks,” says Mauro. “The new system was up and running in less than a month. If we had done this ourselves we would have had to integrate with all of the different providers, with all of the data coming in different formats. That’s not our core competency. Now, we get one set of data and one point of integration.”

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