The eCommerce boom is great in myriad ways. It’s convenient. If you work all day and have kids at home, shopping online may be all you have time for. It allows people access to products they wouldn’t normally be able to purchase. It can get fresh fruits and vegetables to low-income families living in a food desert. On the other hand, maybe you’ve sent, or received, an online product, and felt a twinge of guilt about the fact that your novelty bottle opener came in a cardboard box the size of your head.
The eCommerce industry uses a lot of packaging. The U.S. produces roughly 35 million tons of containerboard per year, and, according to the president of the Fibre Box Association, the use of boxes is growing faster in eCommerce than in any other industry.
eCommerce also hasn’t reduced vehicle emissions in the same way we might have hoped. Several recent studies, including one done in Newark Delaware, have shown that the growth of eCommerce has coincided with an increase in vehicle emissions. Researchers theorized that shoppers getting their goods delivered has put more trucks out on the roads, but has not stopped consumers from also driving out to brick and mortar stores to purchase the types of products that they want to see and feel.
As participants in this industry, we should all take some responsibility for its impact. To that effect, here are a just a few tips to help you run a green eCommerce store.
Educate Your Customers:
You can have a positive experience with your customer post-purchase by giving them a friendly reminder to dispose of their waste responsibly. You might put a message in with the packaging, or put a sticker on the box, with a phrase like, ‘Don’t Forget to Recycle Me!’. You can also go the extra mile by financially incentivizing your customers to make environmentally conscious decisions. Amazon offers a $1 credit towards an eBook to customers who receive an order of multiple items in as few boxes as possible.
Make Sure Your Shipping Boxes are Recycled:
eCommerce vendors are already pretty good at this. The Fibre Box Association reported that 90% of the corrugated packaging used by the eCommerce industry was recycled. Still, it doesn’t hurt to check on where you’re sourcing your packaging to make sure you’re part of that 90%.
Think Outside the Box:
Paper mailers can be made of 100% recycled material, and are more easily recycled than cardboard boxes. Many soft goods and apparel don’t require the protection of a box. If you sell these kinds of products, consider a paper or padded mailer instead of containerboard.
Go By Ground:
When it comes to green shipping, slower is better. Airplanes use a lot of fuel, and produce a lot of emissions. Also, because they travel so high up, they release their emissions directly into the upper atmosphere. Express delivery also involves extra packaging materials. Items for next-day delivery are usually packaged in special boxes or envelopes that are padded extensively. To save on extra emissions and extra packaging, try offering your customers an incentive to choose a ground shipping option.
Turn Your Sustainable Habits Into Conversions:
Eco-conscious customers are a hard bunch to impress, but if you put the time and effort into making your business into a green eCommerce store, you should reap the benefits. Consider getting a custom designed icon that you can put next to products or shipping options that are environmentally friendly. Not only will this encourage your customers to choose the greener options, but it may lead eco-conscious customers to choose your products over competitors that don’t advertise similar values.
Right-Size Your Packaging:
The oversized-box problem the introduction jokes about is also a cost problem: you pay dimensional-weight shipping rates on the air inside an oversized carton, so shrinking the box usually lowers freight cost at the same time it lowers waste. Audit your three or four most common order profiles and stock box sizes that actually fit them, use right-sized mailers for soft goods, and replace plastic bubble wrap and foam peanuts with paper void fill or molded pulp inserts that customers can recycle curbside. A handful of box sizes matched to real order shapes beats one universal box for both sustainability and margin.
Offset and Consolidate Shipments:
Many carriers and shipping platforms now offer carbon-neutral or carbon-offset delivery as a label option, and some let the customer opt in at checkout. Where you control fulfillment, encourage order consolidation — a single shipment of three items has a far smaller footprint than three separate boxes — by offering a small incentive for "ship together when ready" rather than splitting items as they become available.
Source and Communicate Honestly:
The fastest way to lose an eco-conscious customer is a sustainability claim they can see through. If your boxes are recycled, say what percentage. If you offset shipping, name the program. Vague "eco-friendly" badges with nothing behind them read as greenwashing and do more damage than no claim at all. Concrete, verifiable specifics ("made from 100% post-consumer recycled fiber," "ships plastic-free") are both more persuasive and more defensible.
Make Sustainability a Conversion Lever, Not Just a Cost
Running greener does not have to be purely a cost center — handled well it is a differentiator. Build a short, honest sustainability page and link to it from the footer and from product pages, so a researching customer can find it. Surface the relevant fact at the moment of decision: a recycled-packaging icon on the product page, a "carbon-neutral shipping" line at checkout, a note in the order confirmation about how to recycle the mailer. These small, well-placed signals reassure the segment of shoppers who actively prefer responsible brands and would otherwise have no way of knowing you qualify.
It also compounds with retention. Customers who choose a brand partly on values tend to be more loyal and more vocal, so the same investment that reduces waste can lift repeat purchase rate and word of mouth. The practical move is to treat the green initiative like any other conversion feature: implement it, make it visible at the right step of the journey, and measure whether the segment that engages with it converts and returns at a higher rate than the rest. Frame it that way and the sustainability budget defends itself.
These are just a few of the things that you might do to contribute to a more sustainable eCommerce industry. If you have any other ideas for ways to help the industry run greener, leave them in the comments below. If you have an eco friendly product that doesn’t have a store yet, or want to give your site a few touch ups to advertise your sustainable practices, we have a team of expert eCommerce developers that can handle any project.