Retailers, if your New Year’s Resolution was to bring social features to your own site, you’re in luck. Gigya and eMarketer each released new research papers yesterday focused on the specifics for successful Social Shopping.

eMarketer’s research, titled Social Commerce:Personalized and Collaborative Shopping Experiences touches on several topics related to the future of Social Shopping.

The study answers three questions:

• What are the benefits of social login?
• How are retailers leveraging Facebook to create a personalized shopping experience?
• How are retailers enabling collaborative shopping on their websites?

According to eMarketer, “retailers are exploring a new frontier in social commerce as they go beyond simply offering Facebook pages and Twitter profiles for their customers to follow. Fueling this trend is web retailers’ quick adoption of social login, which allows consumers to log in to their Facebook account instead of registering on an ecommerce site. Social login gives retailers access to rich profile information for targeting customers. eMarketer principal analyst and author of the new report believes that ’Bringing Facebook profile data into retail sites makes sense because it influences consumers when they are close to conversions. In contrast, many consumers on Facebook are mainly socializing with friends and further removed from making purchase decisions.’”

The study references the proprietary research Gigya conducted in August 2010. “The Gigya study highlighted the benefits that online retailers and media-entertainment publishers derive from offering social login. At the top of the list were increased engagement (84%) and richer profile information for targeting product recommendations, emails, promotions and coupons (80%).

‘Social networks like Facebook are a hub of information about people’s likes and interests,’ said Grau. ‘When consumers give a retailer permission to access their personal data on Facebook, the merchant sees not only what those people have written in their profiles but also the content they have ‘liked’ on other sites.’”

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