(Re)Defining sustainable e-commerce
As sustainable e-commerce is becoming a more discussed topic, we need a better mental model of what sustainable e-commerce actually means, and how designers can contribute to responsible online shopping.
Sustainability is justifiably a hot topic that impacts all kinds of businesses, including e-commerce.
- 🛍️ Conscious consumers are ready to pay higher prices to support sustainable brands.
- 🙏 Shareholders increasingly demand climate efforts from companies
- 💰 Companies have to pay million-dollar fines when they forget to follow consumer protection laws in the pursuit of increasing their sales numbers online
To help companies navigate the world of sustainable e-commerce, more and more articles pop up, sharing best practices, examples, and encouraging statistics. While I do love the effort, I often find myself confused by these articles. Because they usually mix general sustainable business advice (eg: build a sustainable brand ethos or produce sustainably) and sustainable online sales specific advice (eg: prevent returns by offering virtual fitting rooms).
Yes, both aspects are important to build an overall sustainable online business but conflating the word e-commerce with online business is confusing.
E-commerce is a distribution channel
Let’s start with some definitions. E-commerce is a distribution channel. It means: trading goods and services online.
This makes an e-commerce business a company that generates revenue from selling products or services online.
In other words, your brand ethos and production supply chain are independent of the channel you decide to distribute your products.
❌ E-commerce ≠ your brand
❌Ecomerce ≠ your product or your production supply chain
✅ E-commerce = selling your goods and services online.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
❌ Sustainable e-commerce ≠ sustainable product
✅ Sustainable e-commerce = selling your goods and services online in a way that minimizes negative environmental and social impact.
In this article we focus on the sales of physical products online.
Design’s role in sustainable e-commerce
Another result of this lax interpretation of sustainable e-commerce is that articles discuss less relevant advice (brand ethos, production) while ignoring areas that are defining elements of e-commerce. For example the actual design of e-commerce websites.
What does a sustainable e-commerce UX and UI look like? 0 of the top 10 articles for the “sustainable e-commerce” keyword search specifically discuss UI or UX practices. Some of them mention UX-adjacent advice like reducing returns by for example “clearly communicate to your customers the environmental consequences of unlimited shopping returns” or “Write thorough and transparent product descriptions”. Yet there is a lack of discussion about what makes a sustainable e-commerce design.
To illustrate what I mean, let’s do a quick thought experiment. If a brand sells the most sustainable products and delivers with the lowest carbon emission, yet uses aggressive pushy design patterns (like Buy now, only one item left in stock messages) to make their users buy more than they need…can we still say it is sustainable e-commerce? Understanding, of course, that overconsumption is one of the leading causes of climate change.
That is why we need to redefine sustainable e-commerce. We need a better model that not only differentiates between production and distribution channel-related sustainability practices but also defines the role of design in sustainable e-commerce. In this article, I propose and explain this new model.
The sustainable e-commerce business model
The model consists of 2 parts.
Part 1: General sustainable business practices: Business practices that make a brand or company considered sustainable. (regardless if they choose to sell their products in physical stores or online)
- Having a sustainable brand ethos
- Producing in a sustainable way
- Offering sustainable services
Part 2: Sustainable e-commerce practices: practices that minimize the negative environmental and social impact of the sales of goods online.
4. Choosing the e-commerce channel(s) responsibly
5. Using sustainable e-commerce design
6. Using green delivery
Adding these two together will make a sustainable e-commerce business
Now let’s talk in detail about each part. With examples!
Part 1: General sustainable business practices
1. Sustainable brand ethos
The brand ethos is the core of your brand that states what you stand for. A sustainable brand ethos is centered around an environmental or social sustainability issue. There is no one perfect way to approach sustainability, and one brand can’t focus on all sustainability issues.
Here are a few examples of sustainable brand ethos:
- Consuming less (environmental sustainability): Asket has the brand ethos: “The Pursuit of Less”. With high-quality and timeless pieces they are working toward a “world with less clutter, less waste” and “a world free of fast consumption.”
- Pollute less (environmental sustainability): Empiresquid Organics say: “We strive to bring you products that won’t pollute your body or the Earth.”
- Exploit less (social sustainability): Tony’s Chocolate is on the mission of “100% exploitation free the norm in chocolate”.
- Waste less (environmental sustainability): Mud Jeans follows a circular business model: “Creating a waste-free world, that’s what we stand for. With closed-loop post-consumer recycled denim, we breathe new life into our jeans, giving them a fresh start and extending their journey.”
2. Sustainable production and supply chain
Companies can live their values by making sure their products are made in an environmentally and socially sustainable way. For example:
- Consume less: Asket focuses on creating high-quality, durable garments to move away from quickly changing trends that necessitate excessive consumption. “We have no seasonal collections or limited drops. We put our entire focus on building a single, permanent collection of uncompromising essentials, one piece at a time. We manufacture exclusively in Europe, source the finest fibres in the world and pride ourselves in delivering the perfect fit for more people with our extended size system”
- Pollut less: Empiresquid Organics focuses on chemical-free, handcrafted products to live by their ethos. “We are a small, family-run business dedicated to bringing you handcrafted, amazingly wholesome, chemical-free bath, body and home products made from all-natural and certified organic ingredients.”
- Exploit less: Tony’s Chocolate is dedicated to responsible chocolate sourcing. “Over the last few years, we’ve been working on Tony’s Chocolonely’s Sourcing Principles for exploitation-free cocoa. At this point, we are confident that it enables cocoa farmers to earn a living income. And that will put an end to forced labor and illegal child labour on cocoa farms in West Africa.”
- Waste less: Mud Jeans produces new garments from old jeans to live by circular principles. “We recycle your worn jeans with love, into new yarn and new fabric, minimizing water usage to create the next generation of denim.”
3. Sustainable services and other business practices
Besides sustainable production and supply chains, companies can offer services and other business practices that align with their sustainability approach.
- Impact transparency: Asket aims to avoid unnecessary consumption, so they give detailed information about the garments to help users make the right decisions.
- Offer leasing instead of buying. Mud Jeans allows their customers to lease instead of buy jeans and take the used pairs back when the lease period is over. This aligns with their pursuit of a circular business.
- Other sustainable practices: offer emission offsetting, repair service, trade-in program, charity donations, etc
To sum it up, there are many different approaches a brand can take to be more environmentally or socially sustainable. The important thing to recognize is that none of these are connected to the distribution channel they will decide to sell their product.
Once a company chooses the e-commerce distribution path, it should make sure that the way it sells online is also environmentally and socially responsible.
Part 2: Sustainable e-commerce practices
4. Sustainable online sales channel(s)
There are many ways to sell products online, eg: building your own webshop to sell directly to customers, using a marketplace like Amazon, or now even through social media (TikTok or Instagram). Various factors influence which channel a brand will choose. For example how to best reach their target group, the type of product, and what is financially feasible, etc.
One factor could be environmental or social sustainability.
As an example, let’s take social media shops. There have been countless complaints that social media platforms are turning into one big consumer fever dream pushing for excessive consumption. (Again, excessive consumption of unnecessary stuff is a very unsustainable behaviour). For you pages prioritize sales content and checkout is so easy it is actually dangerous.
Considering this, you will never see Asket sell on TikTok shop. Or an influencer doing a sponsored Asket haul where you can comment “The Pursuit of Less” to get discount codes. Asket envisions “a world free of fast consumption”, so this kind of mindless e-commerce definitely does not align with their values. Having their own physical and online store to sell directly to customers is aligned with their sustainability approach.
5. Sustainable e-commerce design
The most under-discussed area of sustainable e-commerce. How do we design sustainable e-commerce UX and UI?
There are two ways to work with this: designing e-commerce websites for minimal emissions and energy use (sustainable UX) or designing e-commerce to encourage sustainable user behaviour.
5.1 Designing low-emission sites
If you choose to build your own webshop, now it is time to think about how to reduce the energy usage of your site. Or if you are a designer at a marketplace, like Amazon, or a resale giant like Asos, you can (and should) still consider these practices.
You might have heard the term sustainable UX floating around. It is all about minimising energy use and thus the emission of digital products through design decisions. For example, choosing an energy-efficient color palette, or using fewer pictures and videos to reduce the processing power needed to load a page. We can apply these low-emission principles in e-commerce web design too.
Here is an example, Tangie, from Sandy Dähnert. You can find more low-carbon e-commerce examples on her site, Green the Web.
5.2 Designing for sustainable user behaviour
The goal of e-commerce is to sell products to customers. However as mentioned earlier, excessive consumption of unnecessary stuff is a massive contributor to climate change. So when we think about designing for sustainable user behaviour, we can think about designing for mindful and responsible consumption. We can help the user make thought-through, intentional decisions by for example:
- Inform users about the impact and origins of the product, like Asket does.
- Showing detailed size and fit so they can avoid buying the wrong items. For example, Patagonia adds the model’s height and the size they are wearing so the user can make better decisions. They also have a separate Size guide to provide even more guidance in choosing the right size.
- Allowing users to filter for sustainable options. For example, Boozt has a “Made with care” filter to allow users to find more sustainable products
Another way we can encourage sustainable behaviour is to help users use the products they buy for a long period and dispose of them responsibly after their useful life. For example, Asket adds care instructions to every product. They also have a lifecycle section where they remind users that they can repair their garments, or if they don’t want them any more, they can send them back to the company to take care of them responsibly.
Side note
In this case, Asket offers sustainable services in the form of repair and trade-in programs and these services are reflected in the UI. So in reality the model is not linear as it is depicted but the parts are interconnected and impact each other.
When we design for mindful consumption, what we should be avoiding is using pushy patterns to get users to make quick, impulse purchases. For example:
- Avoid urgency messages. Temu is a notorious pushy pattern user and in this example, they use “Almost sold out” (4 times) and other urgent language like “Lightning deal”, and “ending soon” to trigger impulse actions.
- Avoid overwhelming and confusing discounts. Shein usually presents multiple overlapping discounts which 1) potentially makes it difficult for the user to understand what is discounted at what price 2) get users excited about finding more amazing deals and add more stuff to other baskets thanks to these bargain prices. Again, very intentional design decisions to trigger impulse actions.
6. Green delivery
The environmental impact of delivering products can be massive. Think packaging waste, or resource use and emissions from delivery. That is why companies that sell online should work on reducing their delivery impact by for example:
- Embracing eco-friendly packaging material
- Reducing the amount of packaging material needed
- Optimizing delivery routes
- Green last-mile delivery.
- and more.
Where do you, as a designer, have an impact?
Now that you have the big picture of what a sustainable e-commerce business is, let’s talk a bit about where you can make a difference. As always, the answer is: it depends.
It depends on what design role you are in.
- As a product designer: you probably have the highest impact in designing for sustainable behaviour.
- As a UI or design system designer, you can focus on implementing low-carbon practices.
- Founder or C level: you are in the position to set or influence company strategy and direction. You can work on shaping a sustainable brand ethos or introducing sustainable services.
The point is, that there is something, even if it is the smallest thing, you could do in your current position to help your company be more environmentally and/or socially responsible.
Disclaimers & limitations of the model
As with all models, this is a simplified version of reality. While the parts seem linearly organized in the visualization, in reality, they are interconnected and impact each other. The goal of this model is not to map reality 1:1 but rather to create a shared mental model so we discuss sustainable e-commerce with more nuance.
With that said, I’m more than happy to hear your feedback and iterate on this model.
Hi, I’m Anna, UX researcher, and advocate for mindful consumption by design. I post about this topic semi-regularly on LinkedIn, and I drive Kind Commerce to challenge pushy e-commerce designs. Let’s connect!
