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More businesses are working hard to reduce their carbon footprint, and consumers now often prefer to spend their money with businesses with stronger green credentials. For online retailers, being more sustainable can be hard, but it can be done with some of these tips.
Offer A Choice Of Greener Shipping
Some delivery carriers offer more environmentally friendly shipping options with greener trucking services. Look for companies that offer more sustainable options, such as bikes or electric vehicles to deliver your parcels.
More carriers have invested in making their delivery options more eco-friendly, especially within city centers.
By offering your customers the choice of a greener shipping option, you can make sure that your carbon footprint is lowered. You could also go one step further and offer a completely green fleet of delivery services.
Ditch The Plastic Packaging
Goods that you buy online often come in a plastic, from the outside packaging and the individual items. Retailers can learn from large businesses like clothing company Zara, which went completely plastic-free a few years ago. Items from Zara are shipped in recycled cardboard boxes and aren’t individually packaged, which reduces the amount of waste that is produced. These boxes can then be reused for storage, or recycled again.
Use Reusable Packaging
Another option is to reuse your packaging. For example, you could send your parcels in cardboard boxes with a card slip around the outside. This slip is where the shipping label is attached and once it has been removed, the inside box can be reused again. This is a simple way to make returns more sustainable. If a customer needs to return their order, they can do it in the original packaging, and you can use the box again yourself just by adding a new slip.
Ban Returned Goods Being Destroyed
A lot of large online retailers destroy many returns instead of repackaging them, as it is often cheaper for companies to just throw things away rather than reselling them.
This obviously has a big impact on the environment, as many of these items end up in landfill. Companies should rethink their returns process and stop destroying perfectly functional goods that get sent back.
Do Not Offer Free Returns
Returns currently cost retailers a huge amount of money every year. Fashion retailers tend to see the highest level of returns from their customers. The cost to the environment of returns is even greater than it is to companies. In the US, returns create 5 billion pounds of landfill waste and produce 15 million tonnes of carbon emissions every year. This is around the same amount of rubbish that is produced by 5 million people in one year.
A lot of online retailers offer their customer free returns. As a result of this, customers often order a lot more stuff than they intend to keep. A lot of shoppers over-order on purpose and then just return what they don’t want. If retailers didn’t offer free returns, customer might think twice about doing this and stop ordering more than they want.