Ways To Go Green With Your eCommerce Business

Despite the fact that you lack a brick-and-mortar location, your eCommerce business can still harm the environment. Your products could be contributing to landfills and the transportation of your goods produces air pollution. Implement some ways to go green with your eCommerce business so that you can make your practices more sustainable. You’ll be helping the planet and many discerning customers will appreciate the efforts you make as well.

Make Shipping Greener

Using gas-burning trucks and other large vehicles for shipping your products is currently unavoidable. However, you can offer customers greener shipping options to help reduce the extent that delivery vehicles must drive around. For example, you could give them the choice of picking up their packages from set locations. This reduces the amount of driving around that trucks need to do by allowing them to leave multiple orders in a single place. Amazon already has pickup lockers that fulfill this purpose well. As you decide which shipping company to use, you could also go for one that prioritizes lowering its emissions.

Reduce Product Packaging Waste

Packaging is a common source of waste. A way to go green with your eCommerce business is to adjust packaging so that you can minimize this. To start, you should try to convert packaging so that it’s made of recyclable paper instead of plastic. Other than paper, there are also other biodegradable materials that you can use, such as corn starch. Research what’s out there to pick what’s best for your business. You can also reduce packaging waste in eCommerce by making your packages smaller. There shouldn’t be too much excess space between your product and the dimensions of the box or wrapping that it’s in. Being mindful of this will allow you to use fewer materials for packaging.

Start an Environmental Initiative

Shipping and packaging are integral elements of a functioning eCommerce business. Eco-friendly measures can go beyond processes that your business is already carrying out, though. You can start an environmental initiative to offset any negative effects that you have on the ecosystem. To illustrate, you could commit to planting a tree whenever someone buys a product from you or contribute to a sustainability organization. You might also accept old items back from people to recycle them. Since many consumers have concerns about sustainability, if you use a part of your sales revenue to help the planet, they’ll definitely take notice. So, this is a win-win action that will aid the environment and your business.

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