Account Login and Registration Features

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Creating a Simple & Engaging Member Registration

Account Sign Up, Registration, & Login Capabilities

OK, this next topic is going to be about marketplace sign up, registration, and login. So, one of the big starting places with any system like a marketplace is the ability to sign up and register for an account. Although this is a rather simple capability, it's critical in that it needs to validate that the users that are signing up are actual users and that they're not spam. Depending on the marketplace and how sensitive the information is possibly a competitor or someone that shouldn't have access to certain data.

In addition to that, during the registration process you also want to make it really easy for the buyer or seller to then continue to log in and possibly invite others within their organization. In the best-case scenario, you would be able to easily to include anyone who will be part of their purchasing process to be able to set up an account and tie to the same account that that buyer seller is registered for. So, there's quite a bit of detail associated with those different capabilities and we'll just kind of explore some of that detail in this article below.

Build a Commuinty of Quality Users, Not Robots

Signup & Verification Workflows

Just to start with in general, the buyer sign up and the seller sign up typically are very similar. Usually, you're looking for some very basic information. We encourage keeping the process extremely simple just so that folks have a low overhead to get set up. We also encourage making the process such that there is some form of validation of the email address if possible, and it's not uncommon to set up a multi-factor authentication as well. You could utilize a third-party, a phone number, or some other type of authentication outside of just their email address. This process is needed so that you know they have a valid account and are a real person.

Typically, the most common thing is to set up an email validation link. Once they validate their email, by clicking on the link from their email. Then they're going to have access to their new account. Which usually at minimum is a name, email, and a password. It's important to make sure that the password requirements are strong enough, but not overbearing that whenever a user is signing up there is an issue with their password not being strong enough.

It also really helps to have some simple clean icons and visuals to walk them through the steps so they can see where they are in the process. Now typically, once someone has validated their account, then it's a good time to go ahead and ask them for additional information. It's pretty common to ask them if they're part of a marketplace already, some company information, possibly information associated with purchasing or selling that will be critical to have, but again you want to make as much of this information as we can optional.

Invectivize User Engagement With Benefits

Governance & Gamification

One of the key things with governance or setting up gamification within the marketplace is to create a logic that encourages certain behaviors that you want our users to engage in be it sellers or buyers. So, typically for that scenario where they're registering and providing optional information, you will want to go ahead and think about how they can be motivated without costing the marketplace, a lot of opportunity cost or direct costs.

Some concepts you can explore are things like giving them a complementary set up session with one of your specialists for a seller. That would encourage a seller by filling all their information out in a timely fashion. Someone from the marketplace customer support team would then engage with them and go through a pretty standard automated process, but they would be there watching to make sure the setup steps are done correctly. In a lot of cases we want it to be as automated as possible, both for the seller and for the marketplace, but having somebody provide complementary support and resources is typically going to be a good thing and we just want to make sure that we're funneling that back into improving the process. Eventually creating a process that is automated and immediately available.

But that's just an example of one way to incentivize a seller to fill out their information. If you fill this out quickly and fully then you’ll provide resources as a marketplace to help set their store up. Another one is if a buyer completes this process, they will get access to a set level of membership. Maybe their premier membership gives them better notifications and access to certain notification capabilities. So, you could give them access to a premier membership for 7 days or something like that, so they can try it out and preview of what it's like to have those capabilities.

Reducing the Entry Barrier

Ease of Access

Now certainly not a requirement, but it's something for you to consider with your marketplace depending on your audience type. If you're dealing with a lot of one-off buyers that are consumers, they probably don't need that. They might prefer to use a Facebook or a Google account in order to access their account and register. So, turning on things like single sign-on with Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc, is a really nice option. They don't have to remember another username and password right?

So, there's just some examples of things that you can do to encourage getting that information from the buyers and the sellers. In addition to that, one of the things that really helps with buyer-seller engagement is making it so that folks can easily access the system and continue to come into the system with the low barrier to entry. Commonly if it's a company to company type of model, you can set up multi factor and single sign-on so that it's really easy to use as an end user and a lot of times single sign-on can be things like Okta and Auth0. There are quite a few single sign-on providers that can be enabled for different vendors and different sellers, so that the people within their team can access the system easily.

Building a Scalable Solution

Additional Applications & Considerations

Those are all capabilities that should ideally be fairly turn key for your marketplace, both on the buyer and the seller side of things. In addition to that the one of the benefits of having sign on is you’re confirming folks and you're making sure that they are who they say they are through authenticating. However, you certainly can tweak the settings so that they can stay logged in and keep accessing the system easily through your various different means of accessing the marketplace.

For example, if you are using a mobile app within the marketplace they can access. You might consider doing things like enabling face ID and other forms of easy access whenever they're accessing through the mobile device, etc. So, pulling information from existing sources like Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn during the registration process and then using single sign-on with those same sources can be really powerful.

Ultimately, though it's really all about iterating and continuing to improve your governance processes. All the while encouraging behavior that you're looking for within the marketplace by helping the users to move through the process and provide key information and giving them an incentive along the way. There's nothing like a little bit of incentive to really encourage the right behavior.

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