Green eCommerce: Tips For How to Make Your Business Eco-Friendly

Consumers are becoming increasingly environmentally conscious. Rather than being guided purely by price and quality when making buying decisions, shoppers also consider ethics and environmental policies as a part of their buying decisions.

As a brand owner, if you want to compete, you need to find ways to show your customers how much you care about the environment.

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Making the Right Kind of Impact

Bricks and mortar companies have a relatively good degree of flexibility when it comes to showing their environmental policies and positioning themselves as eco-friendly brands.

With an online business, relaying the same message is harder but still very possible. You need to clearly communicate the effort you put into staying green and reducing your footprint. 

Building an Eco-Friendly Online Store

Your website may be virtual, but it most likely sells real products, and even if all of your dealings are digital, your customers live in the real world. Consider the following when you build your online store:

1) Look for Eco-Friendly Web Hosting

Some web hosts offer eco-friendly options and will offset their energy use under carbon-efficiency schemes, or use green electricity suppliers.

Alternatively, choose shared hosting options, which are less resource-demanding, and share resources with other websites on the same server for both cost and computing efficiency.

Look for a web hosting that participates in such schemes, and that is clear about the energy efficiency ratings of their servers.

This is one area where even some of the biggest websites on the Internet have struggled to differentiate themselves. While many big brands are using a lot of green energy sources, some are still relying heavily on coal and other non-renewables.

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2) Optimize Your Website

To be honest, this one isn't going to make a big impact, but it still counts as a small way you can reduce your environmental footprint. 

Slow-loading websites or sites with poorly written code will strain your visitor's computers and could increase the amount of energy that they drain.

You may have noticed this if you've ever visited a website and noticed the fans on your laptop or desktop spin up while you're viewing the page. There's no need for a website to be so poorly coded.

Use robust content management systems and well-written themes for your website so that it loads quickly and does not tax your visitor's computers. Not only do efficient loading times help to reduce the environmental impact of your site they improve the end-user experience too. This means everyone wins.

3) Pick an Appropriate Theme to Highlight Your Effort

Take a look at the color scheme of your website. Are you straining the monitor with bright colors and flashing graphics?

Do you serve up huge numbers of files, or large files, that will require multiple hits on the hard drives of your servers to supply the pages to your visitors?

Ask your designers to create a 'light' color scheme. For most monitors, a white background is energy-efficient since it reflects the resting state of the screen.

For OLED screens, dark mode-style designs can extend the battery life. Either way, flashing, bright images are not a good choice.

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4) Make your invoices printer friendly

In the ideal world, we would not print out web pages or invoices at all. Printer inks and cartridges are wasteful and have a significant environmental impact. 

It is thought that as many as 80 million cartridges end up in landfill sites every year, and those cartridges can take hundreds of years to decompose.

Include reminders in your invoices and emails to discourage people from printing them out. Provide printer-friendly links to important pages, so that if someone feels that they must print them out, they can do so with minimal wasted paper and ink.

5) Reduce Packaging

If you sell physical goods, then simply making the choice to package those goods in lightweight, renewable, packaging can go a long way. There's no need to ship a small gift in a large box that is stuffed with styrofoam packing cubes.

Use biodegradable packing materials where possible, and pick the smallest quantity of packaging that you can get away with to protect each item.

If you can, make the packaging something that can be re-used so that if a buyer has to send an item back they can simply slide it into the tube or sleeve again for easy posting.

6) Use Efficient Delivery

Source your delivery providers responsibly. Provide discounts for the most energy-efficient and environmentally-friendly delivery options.

Encourage customers to ship multiple items together to save on packaging and delivery driver journeys.

The impact of delivery drivers and freight may be minimal when considered on a per-order basis, but even small changes to shopper habits make a difference and will get your users thinking about how their shopping habits matter.

Wrapping Up

The onset of climate change is sadly an unavoidable reality in today's day and age. However, if enough people make small changes to their habits or businesses, we can make a positive impact on this crisis. After all, for things to get better we don't need a dozen people doing things perfectly, we need thousands doing whatever they can.