Help! I Can't Log in with Google or Amazon
3Hi did you find this because you were trying to log in and the normal button you press to log in with a third party was gone?
If you did, this could be our planned removal of Amazon and Google as authentication providers. We removed them to simplify our UI due to low usage.
Moving forward, Facebook will remain as our only supported 3rd party authentication provider.
All 3rd party created accounts DO create a native profile under your account name or your email address as sign in methods. If you connected an existing account, you may already know the password. If you do not, simply use the Forgot Password link (after a login attempt) to obtain a password reset email.
This post could cover your instructional needs other times when even Facebook login isn’t working or provided on the place you want to log in. Use the same instructions to reset your Native Account Password and log in with your username or your email address.
Thanks for your support.
- 23 comments, 42 replies
- Comment
Boooo!!
Ok I’ll create a password now.
@Ignorant that was about all the agony I could muster as well.
This brings me back to the beginnings of Meh.com when you could still comment on the FAQ post.
Thanks for the nostalgia blast @snapster!
This is very disappointing that you are removing Google Authentication.
Add another password to the pile that I will constantly forget.
@TaRDy I agree. I much prefer the Google method. I just used it to login here so I could comment, in fact. Please don’t make me need another password, snapster.
@TaRDy I’m with you. Prefer Google. I didn’t realize it was so hard to main 3rd party authentication after it was already implemented.
@TaRDy Agreed 1000%
And hissss to zuckerberg’s sociopathic experiment
use 1Password.
Not cool. Just hide the buttons under a menu somewhere to simplify the ui. You’re making things less convenient for non-facebook users. Less secure, too, since now we have to store a password at yet another site!
@damccull Cheer well said
Yuck! Keep Google, please. I’m trying to quit Facebook!
@fitz1j Absolute support
@Cerridwyn 69 days facebook free. If I can make it to 6 months, I think I’ll deactivate my account. Darn sure don’t miss all the drama llamas.
@LaVikinga Congratulations Keep up the good work!
@Cerridwyn The drawback is too many friends/family ONLY use FB as a lazy way of communicating so I find myself left out of the loop on a LOT of news. I’m very tempted to use a dedicated browser for FB only, but I’m not internet/computer savvy enough to know if it would keep the long bony FB fingers out of my business. I refused to download messenger to my old phone. I have a new laptop, ipad, & phone which I’ve never loaded FB crap onto and I’m not too keen on doing it either.
This tinfoil hat is quite becoming on me, BTW.
@LaVikinga Needs horns wink
Good luck
Noooo keep Amazon!
Wow. I feel…nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Please keep Google, 2-factor auth tied to a physical token is a must for me. I don’t trust Facebook enough to use it for auth. Decreasing my security in exchange for a minor aesthetic boost is unacceptable.
I was hoping that you’d tie in amazon payments… but oh well. I guess I’ll try to remember my password…
I tried the password reset and it just gives an error.
Damnit meh! Don’t evict me. I needs me my Google Auth.
I might not buy a bunch, but I check the site nearly every day. I’m just waiting for the right pitch.
Also, fuck Facebook.
@chuk 3 cheers for you
Amazon is my preferred login of choice because … well, I don’t know why but I don’t wanna change it. It just feels right.
Force Wave
Don’t force me to change it.
Logged in just to comment as well. I much prefer if you keep the Google login button due to the 2FA.
Honestly, I don’t login much because there hasn’t been anything I wanted to purchase in a while. But removing google just makes it a bit harder to login and click the Buy It button.
I did this… but now my account (which I used Google before) only shows 1 purchase from a long time ago (nothing recent). Should I be worried/care? I’d like to have that history so I can remember what I’ve purchased in the past. Is this just a blip or will it get restored at some point?
@froppy This is mediocre.com and not meh.com. Different order histories.
@peaceetc why do I have anything on there then? I have something I got on meh.com, only 1 item of about 25
@froppy I have two items in my order history on mediocre.com – a vmp t-shirt and meh socks. Since they were special deals, I assume they routed them through mediocre.com on purpose. Is it something similar with you? Go over to meh.com and see if the rest of your history shows up.
I’m afraid to comment for fear of getting a slew of ‘password reset’ emails, but I just have to beg: please keep Amazon and Google login capability.
@OldCatLady then i’ll get 1000 more than you cause i’m cheering everyone that said that
Devil’s advocate: as long as you’re shooting yourself in the foot in the name of simplifying the UI, you should remove the Facebook login option, too. Don’t do it halfway. Make everyone suffer!
@magnesfox My impression is that, unfortunately, this’d be too big of a blow against reaching out to the kids of people that Mediocre wants to reach with MorningSave. That is to say, so much online socializing (especially among people with money) happens on Facebook now that Mediocre has to build e-commerce solutions specifically to cater to the Facebook crowd. Meanwhile, Amazon and Google aren’t exactly social networks (much to Google’s chagrin, considering G+'s failure to launch), so catering to their users isn’t quite so important.
Now that I write this, I’m curious if having those extra login options has a significant negative effect on the rate of getting Facebook users to log into MorningSave, or if Mediocre is just unsupporting the other two for ease of maintenance on their backend. I’d like to say it’s the latter, but maybe the former is actually true.
@lljk OAuth specifications are similar between networks for the most part. If they are doing this for maintenance reasons that would be dumb because the maintenance on these things is so easy (as long as it’s implemented correctly and the people that work at meh seem to know what they are doing). I was able to implement Facebook login on the website I manage at work pretty effortlessly. The only thing that is really annoying is that people can register to facebook with only a phone number and not an email which can cause issues for sites that require an email.
@lljk Good points.
I’m just confused why anyone would wake up in the morning and say, “Y’know what? It’s too easy for our existing customers to buy from us! Let’s make it harder.” Especially when the work is already done, as @Skylord123 mentions.
Alternate theory: people who log in with Amazon/Google don’t share their purchase to friends on Facebook…
@lljk it’s definitely the latter. We could care less about any of these networks. It’s usage and maintenance. I’ll post below about some peculiar data findings we happen to have.
Just gonna be honest here, I probably won’t ever log in if I can’t just click on my Google account.
I use google. The only service I am constantly logged into. I stay off Facebook because I tend to spend too much time telling people how stupid they are for sharing fake articles…
I have lastpass but still a huge pain in the ass for mobile (since lastpass costs money for the mobile app).
This is also disapointing because I was planning on adding Google login to the website I manage at work… Now you have me wondering if it’s worth my time. I mean, I would use it… but would anyone else?
@Skylord123 given other options with an increasingly mainstream audience, it was a low performer. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be worth it as a sole option. Having 3 dependencies was not worth it but we are maintaining Facebook because it was so dominant.
Curious (or angry) about our decision? Once you’ve sunk your teeth in and believed us to be morons, you’re going to leave and maybe never come back. That sucks, so I’ll do what I can to shed more light:
We have experiment data from gating our MorningSave site during distinct high volume phases where logins / account creation were required to enter. Three of us (me @dave and @shawn) made competing login examples to test different theories. In summary:
The option that included all 3 sign in options consistently had the worst overall conversion. The options with only Facebook consistently had the highest. To be clear, all of them had Facebook and others had more choice. Simplicity of the UI choice was the difference maker.
somewhere around 10% fewer people created an account when given the option to do so with FACEBOOK-GOOGLE-AMAZON than with a single FACEBOOK button.
I didn’t happen to bet on the multiple one because I felt like there was no win in selecting it and being right. I was still pretty surprised by the wide gap. We’ve all heard the paradox of choice stuff but I didn’t expect it to be so clear here.
Add that to the known far lower usage of the other two second place options. Then figure the installation, maintenance and dependency risk of triple third party systems across an increasing number of sites and it’s really hard to make a supportive case.
@snapster facebook is the devil. remove them all or leave them all.
@Cerridwyn none of us our fans of Facebook. We do own spite.com but that idea might be too subtle for its own site
@snapster Did you try Facebook-Google vs Facebook-only as well, or just the trio?
@snapster
/giphy lmao
@snapster Wow, that’s actually a pretty significant difference. Now I’d like to know why removing all options that aren’t Facebook is so much more successful, but I suspect that sort of UI/UX testing is a bit beyond what y’all do in-house.
I don’t use Facebook and I’m not a fan of it either, but when you’re a business with any sort of online presence these days, I guess you have to play nice with Facebook in order to attract and keep non-geeks in your customer base.
@snapster Eazy Peazy solution:
New users register with Facebook. Leave existing infrastructure in place for existing users.
Benefits:
You still get your 10% additional accounts
Exiting users can brag about being in the Elite Google-tier on the forum.
Programmers gain job security, cause someone has to maintain dat mess.
@chuk Except for people who refuse to use facebook, then that is a gatekeeper keeping customers away.
@loop yes. I’ll post the cleanest of our A/B/C test examples that shows that
A. all the login options
B. facebook and google
C. facebook
@lljk isolating the “why” with certainty is beyond us but here’s my theory:
Everyone’s brain wants to find the path of least resistance. A and B are asking the user to make a choice. C asks the user to push a button. Even when the choices would apparently suit some users better, an ok choice for most users that is pre-selected wins by a large margin.
@snapster Option A looks really messy. I don’t know what it is exactly but it just is too much. I wonder if there is a better way of designing this and retaining more login options. Just depends if it is worth it I guess.
Also depending on what network the users are coming from can change what method they use to login. Would be interesting to compare login/registration methods on meh to checkout.org. You may have already done this but could be interesting to compare people coming from a TV network to people that are registering on meh.
@Skylord123 Sure ok. Option A is messy. Option B is less messy. Option C is clean. Clean wins.
I still stick to my choice theory but our solution also works fine where you simply have a line of continuum and messy < clean.
@snapster I use Google (and not Facebook) so I’m sad, but your decision makes sense to me. The problem of choice extends beyond just crowded login buttons. Its why many sites used pre-checked upsells, cross-sales, subscribe to 8 mailer lists and the like. With enough stuff on a page, it seems most people will choose the path of least resistance - and that generally means clicking first and not reading the fine print
@lljk @snapster Duh, one button beats two or three buttons. How about a follow up experiment to determine which button label gets more converts: “Facebook” (Russian troll heaven), “Google” (Ads-R-Us), or “Amazon” (F* you physical stores - except Whole Foods).
@mwarren you’re a year late. I’d want to bet you as much as you were willing to wager on this experiment. I’ll take Facebook. Shitty as it is, it flat out won the Internet ID contest.
@snapster with the attention that the Apple SSO solution is garnering, are you re-evaluating the exclusive use of the FB SSO?
logs in with Google to comment
I have 2 factor set up on Facebook. It’s there for all the people saying that Facebook needs it.
@fitz1j I’m aware Facebook has it, it’s just that I’d rather trust the execs at Enron with my password, over Facebook.
My interpretation is different.
With only a single button, 10% more Facebook people were able to find their button.
Or in other words, Facebook people are too stupid to find their button if there is more than one.
And once there is an interpretation of the data, it is time to make a decision…
Making a decision for a single 3rd party login based on that data presupposes that 10% more logins will be more additive to sales than the logins lost by removing the other options.
And maybe it will. Facebook people and all… I don’t like Facebook and while I’ve tried to like MorningSave, it has not engaged me.
@sdb our dislike of Facebook caused the apparently irrational approach we had and we’re solving for it. Facebook is the singular winner. Email with native password is the only alternate needed.
In this particular test on MorningSave, revenue actually was greater forcing Facebook account creation and login than not requiring a log in at all until purchase. Crazy but Facebook-only not only beat the other login gate variants in total revenue, it beat no gate at all.
MorningSave is not really designed for existing Meh users. It’s a different ocean of new folks. However, some of the fish in that sea will like our edgier reality at Meh (hoped) and vice versa (incidental). In a Venn diagram of “sites that new accounts use”, MorningSave is a cantaloupe and Meh is a grape.
@snapster Interesting side note/antidote…I tried to sign in to the new Medicritee forums as I love snarky/funny tee shirts. No Google sign in so I left. Maybe I will create an account later but why can’t I use the same login I have here?
@tightwad And then I did a password reset using my Google email and got the account set up…darn you mediocre people who get me!
Have you tried the two-step verification it sure works
@amy01 Are you referring to the Facebook two-step verification, or something else?