Aiming to make it easier for consumers to participate in its new online communities, Sears Holdings Corp. announced today that users can sign on to MySears.com and MyKmart.com using their user names and passwords from Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other popular web services.
Sears, No. 7 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, says it is the first major retailer to employ the OpenID standard for using credentials across web sites.
“We have a robust and growing community and we want to take barriers away from people joining, and one of them may be starting from scratch and creating another community ID,” says Rob Harles, vice president of community at Sears.
Now when users arrive at a sign-in screen for the Sears communities they are asked to provide their Sears log-in credentials or to sign in using their user names and passwords from eight other popular web services: Google, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, AOL, Yahoo, Windows Live ID and OpenID. If someone chooses to sign in with Facebook, for example, she is prompted for her Facebook user name and ID, Facebook authenticates her and she is logged onto the Sears community. Sears employs JanRain Inc., a provider of services related to OpenID, to manage the authentication.
There are 250,000 registered users of the two Sears communities, which were launched this spring after two years of tests, and MySears and MyKmart together are visited 1 million times each month, Harles says.
Harles says community members asked to be able to use credentials from other sites to log onto the Sears forums, where they can share experiences, write reviews, participate in surveys and seek advice. He says Sears plans to gradually add new ways to connects its communities with other social web sites. For instance, Sears is considering letting its IDs be used to authenticate users on other sites that employ the OpenID authentication technology, and to accept credentials from more sites than the original eight.
In addition, he says, Sears is exploring how to make it easier for its members to exchange content from MySears or MyKmart with other social networks, for instance, taking a review written for MySears and putting it on the writer’s Facebook page. But he says Sears will move cautiously to make sure it is protecting customers’ privacy. “We’re taking tentative steps to make sure we’re not going too far out on a limb,” Harles says. “Giving customers more control and choice over how their information is used is key.”
OpenID technology is employed by 25,000 web sites worldwide, potentially enabling 500 million individuals to use OpenID credentials, according to JanRain.
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