How to make your e-commerce business truly sustainable

The foremost advantage of e-commerce is convenience. You can browse goods from the comfort of your own residence, compare offers without running from store to store, and get what you wish, delivered wherever you wish. But to proceed having fun with this convenience, we’d like to make it more sustainable.

The importance of sustainability has long been recognized across industries. However, many obstacles delay the transition to more sustainable practices. Advanced data collection and evaluation technologies give hope that ecological e-commerce is achievable and may even increase business profitability.

Sustainable development – ​​an honest goal or greenwashing?

Most growing corporations declare their commitment to sustainable development. Demonstrates awareness of general trends in consumer behavior. For example, searching online for sustainable goods increased by 71% over the last five years. But does this represent a real change in the way products are manufactured and delivered?

Greenwashing – presenting a business practice or product as more environmentally friendly than it actually is, has been around for many years. Jay Westerveld, who coined the term in 1986, warned against this greenwashing has developed practices as Earth Day 2024 marketing campaigns approach. He says understanding these recent types of greenwashing is especially necessary now that the power of artificial intelligence to disseminate information is rapidly growing.

While AI presents recent challenges, today’s consumers, especially the digitally native generation, are definitely able to dig deeper. The growing variety of online searches related to sustainability shows that buyers prefer to research products somewhat than rushing into a purchasing decision. Therefore, even beyond ethical and environmental considerations, corporations have to be honest with their advertised sustainability goals to proceed to attract customers.

How to ensure sustainable development of e-commerce

Instead of using AI to spread half-truths, brands can use such solutions to gather hard facts that can help make sustainable e-commerce profitable. For online providers truly committed to this goal, several areas of focus are key.

Minimizing overproduction with demand forecasting:

Consistently producing much greater than you sell normally means bad business. Even when overproduction pays off financially, as in the case of enormous players in the fashion industryproduction data is kept secret, knowing the reputational damage that disclosure of large-scale waste could bring.

Therefore, the top e-commerce strategy is to optimize the supply chain to minimize overproduction. In particular, advanced demand forecasting using ML-based toolsis the most promising way to achieve this goal.

Demand variability in the supply chain is influenced by many global and local aspects, from promotions and changing market trends to political events and weather. Many data points covering these and other variables are publicly available on the Internet. The key to effective e-commerce forecasting is the ability to extract location-specific public data from various sources.

Competitive advantage in promoting sustainable products:

Sustainable products can create different customer experiences. Some will think of sustainability as a bonus, others will suspect that certain quality attributes have been sacrificed for this purpose. Online sellers need to keep this in mind when selecting how to promote its sustainable offer in the face of fierce competition.

Competitive advantage comes from the very nature of e-commerce, which allows for automatic monitoring of all competitors’ activities in real time. Tracking price changes helps sellers analyze the market for sustainably produced products and discover opportunities to offer the best deal. Meanwhile, gathering information on how competitors promote their sustainable offerings will provide insight into which customer segments they are targeting.

Implementation of reusable packaging:

The alternative of packaging has a decisive impact on the possibility of sustainable e-commerce. Despite ongoing efforts to transition to reusable packaging, economic challenges and uncertainty often hamper implementation.

As he noticed McKinsey expertsSuccessfully scaling reusable packaging would require comprehensive research into relevant economic, environmental and social aspects. Forecasting the crucial infrastructure costs, ensuring that the CO₂ emissions and water use of a reusable system do not negate its advantages, and identifying ways to encourage consumer cooperation requires careful planning based on multi-faceted data.

The consumer sentiment and market data collected should represent the various geographic locations that the e-commerce provider serves. Localized research will improve decision-making in planning the transition to reusable packaging and enable local sustainability concerns to be taken into account when promoting it.

Persistence of knowledge collection

The elephant in the room when it comes to facilitating sustainable e-commerce through data is that large-scale data collection itself requires energy-intensive infrastructure based on thousands and thousands of consistently running servers. The resource and process optimization possible with such infrastructure likely outweighs its drawbacks. However, industry leaders should address the remaining challenges themselves.

In the online information gathering industry, several aspects are critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

1. Companies can avoid waste by collecting only the crucial data points and using the best, best solutions to reduce errors and retries. Although collecting e-commerce data is difficult due to the dynamic nature of marketplace web sites, following best practices or looking for expert advice will assist you achieve your data goals with fewer attempts. Additionally, it should protect resources by avoiding IP blocking and saving memory space.

2. Automated web data extraction relies on local proxies. There are thousands and thousands of user devices connected to the Internet around the world, which devour energy. Incitement of device owners rent their unused bandwidth allows for greater value creation through shared resources.

3. Data centers that may otherwise be closed after serving their purpose are being refurbished as proxy hosts for public data collection. This extends the life cycle of existing infrastructure.

4. Combining existing hardware to build a reliable and efficient web data collection infrastructure reduces the need for corporations to create custom solutions. So, like a well-functioning public transport system, such infrastructure might be cost-effective for users and help save resources.

In the ideal world that will come in the future, intelligence gathering corporations and data holders could agree to let data flow freely while foregoing measures to prevent data theft. While these measures lead to a resource-intensive cat-and-mouse game of making and avoiding scraping obstacles, the best we are able to do is make sure our own data collection practices are as sustainable as possible.

The only long-term option is to shift to sustainable e-commerce products and practices. However, projects that may speed up this transformation often fail despite honest intentions.

Suppliers need time- and location-sensitive data to optimize their supply chain and ensure sustainability is financially viable. Large-scale data collection might be resource-intensive, but organizations need reliable information to avoid unnecessary decisions. Finding ways to make data collection infrastructure more efficient and sustainable will likely be critical to the way forward for e-commerce.