Single Sign-On (SSO) Solution For FORD – Shopify Store

Ford Motor is an automobile company that designs, manufactures, markets, and services a full line of Ford trucks, utility vehicles, cars as well as Lincoln luxury vehicles. They have 16% of the market share in the automobile industry. It is the second-largest automobile brand in the world.

Ford has a Merchandise store and Dealership stores that are e-commerce websites and are hosted on the Shopify platform and these stores consist of branded Shirts, Hoodies, Outwears, Hats, Caps, and other accessories such as Drinkware, Keychains, Sports bottle, Car Toys, Backpack, etc. Any new customers/employees can sign up/sign in into ford merchandise stores and buy their products online.

Without miniOrange, existing users will be required to sign up again and FORD will be required to manage the user base, credentials, and their permission in Shopify as well. It will be a waste of time for existing users to create new credentials. miniOrange Single Sign-On (SSO) integration with FORD saves their organization time and money as using one set of credentials users can sign in to their different applications so the organization doesn’t have to waste storage for saving the existing user credentials for their different applications.

Consider a scenario where Ford employees want to create an account on the Merchandise Store. Generally, people use the same username and password for different applications in the same organization. If an attacker gets access to the less secured application, they are likely to access other corporate applications. miniOrange provides SSO to Ford merchandise stores using the credentials from the centralized server (AD) of the Ford organization. Depending upon the type of user whether they are employees or dealers or resellers, tags are assigned and access to the different resources and permissions are given. Different discount schemes based on the assigned tags are provided to dealers/suppliers and employees.

How miniOrange Single Sign-On Solution works for Ford Store on Shopify?

What is the Workflow?

Whenever an existing user visits the store and tries to sign in, the service provider redirects him to the miniOrange provided SSO application. After that, a token request is made for authorization and is sent to the identity provider. In our case, the identity provider is FORD. An authentication request is generated for the user to verify his/her identity in the active directory and if the user credentials exist, a trusted token is issued from the active directory federation service (ADFS) which is sent in response to the token request made by miniOrange Shopify SSO application. miniOrange then sends the SSO response to the service provider and the user is granted access to the store.

Customer sign up/sign in options:

If the customer is an existing employee or dealer/supplier in the ford organization then they can sign in by choosing the ford employee login button. Now there are two ways to log in, one is for the employee of the ford organization and another one is for dealers and suppliers associated with ford. On choosing the appropriate option they will be redirected to their respective login pages then they can sign in using their username and password. If the identity of the employee/dealer is available in the active directory then access to the Store will be granted to them.

miniOrange can provide Single Sign-On SSO solutions for Automobile companies looking for merchandise stores or dealer merchandise stores similar to that of Ford Motors. With miniOrange SSO Solution employees can use the same credentials being used in their organizations to access the merchandise store based on Shopify as well as any other website or application present in your business architecture.

With respect to Shopify SSO integration, miniOrange also provides Adaptive SSO security features, an added layer of fraud detections that provides risk-based, multi-factor authentication (MFA,2FA) for Shopify stores seeking to protect against frauds across various digital channels. Only authenticated users can access your Store. Also, restrict the number of concurrent sessions a user can have with the Adaptive Authentication method.

Key Benefits of the solution to Ford Stores:

1. Ease Of Access: Easily integrate your existing Identity Provider or Data Source and provide a SSO solution without having to build a new system/framework.
2. Easy to integrate: For the end users, it reduces the responsibility of managing multiple sets of usernames and passwords.
3. Manage Users on existing system: With Auto sync administrators can manage their users in their own existing system without having to move users or maintain them in multiple applications.
4. Easy to Extend: If your apps grow in the future, which needs SSO (either SAML based or non-SAML based), then miniOrange cloud SSO service has ready-made connectors for it.
5. Saves time: Groups are automatically assigned to users based on their email domain at the time of SSO.
6. Cost effective: No hassle of building or managing a new system for Single Sign On. With a user-reverification system make sure only the relevant and active users are using the applications at all times thus reducing the overall cost.

Additional Resources

• What is Single Sign-On SSO?
• Single Sign-On using OpenID Connect?
• What is Identity Broker Services?