Online shopping: The “explosion” of ecommerce
3, 2, 1... the countdown to the golden season of online shopping begins. The little ones at home are already starting to think about their Christmas gifts, the online shopping carts are filling up, and many of the Christmas purchases are starting to be prepared. And the starting signal takes place this week, specifically on the 11th, does 11/11 ring a bell?
What began in China as a day for singles to get together to make plans and enjoy being single has become the day of the year with the highest percentage of online sales in the world. The company Alibaba, proclaimed this day as the day of online sales, selling 1,000 million dollars per minute and a half. With this sales boom, it is normal that many other international companies joined this date of promotions where discounts of up to 99% on some products stand out.
Those sales quotas are the result of millions of shipments that will be traveling thousands of miles to reach the end consumer creating a line of contamination. That line can be thick or thin, and this depends on both the companies and the end users.
With the recent presence of the COP26 where emphasis is being placed on the climate emergency in which we are immersed “spikes in carbon dioxide emissions higher and higher”, we find ourselves at a time when we ask ourselves the following question: what if we start this boom in online shopping reducing, or at least not increasing, our environmental impact?
Every second that passes, around 3,000 packages are shipped. This is a tremendous logistical deployment that has given rise to a drive for innovation in this sector. What can we do as a company? Here are some tips on how to do it.
This tip could be considered as one of the most key to reduce environmental impact. Offering different delivery options helps to reduce CO2 emissions, as simple as offering a free delivery option that is not immediate, thus avoiding logistical saturation. To do this you must contrast it with a fast delivery option that has a monetary fee, to which we can add a reminder to users about the carbon footprint generated by express delivery.
According to Accenture, 36% of consumers favor free delivery options even if they mean a longer wait to receive their purchases. Encourage it! The 36% of consumers are opting for free delivery option, Accenture.
A very important aspect regarding shipping options, did you know that 2 out of 10 deliveries are failed during the first attempt? This means that the carrier has to make at least two trips per delivery, which increases the carbon footprint of the delivery. Solution? Allow consumers to choose when and where to receive their purchases, for example, by encouraging the use of Click and Collect collection points, your consumers will be able to pick up their purchases for convenience and supporting urban sustainability.
It is a trend, and it consists of optimizing logistic transport, how? Well, by pooling shipments from different companies until the capacity of the logistic vehicles is reached. A real optimization of resources.
If you have star products, which represent a large volume of orders at national level, we advise you to consider the location of several logistics centers near your customers. This will reduce delivery kilometers, costs and greenhouse gas emissions.
The packaging of your products helps to convey a shopping experience to your users by allowing you to convey a message. What if that message is conveyed with a sustainable background? Use less packaging material and prioritize packaging with recyclable and/or biodegradable elements. You can also give double use to the packaging of your shipments: design it to serve as a means of return in case it is necessary, thus achieving a reduction of waste.
There are many other sustainable tips that you as a company can follow this season. Join the change towards improving the environment. Sustainable ecommerce is possible.
