From the course: Digital Sustainability: How to Reduce Your Digital Footprint

The impact of ecommerce

From the course: Digital Sustainability: How to Reduce Your Digital Footprint

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The impact of ecommerce

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- E-commerce has a major impact on the environment as products purchase online require transportation leading to an increase in the use of fossil fuels. This is in addition to the impact of the devices, digital applications and servers needed to make transactions happen. Here are some ways to reduce the carbon footprint of our e-commerce activities. Use e-commerce sites that are transparent and provide clear reporting on the environmental considerations they take into account in their digital activities from the servers they use to the shipping services they offer to the packaging. Avoid opening too many browser's windows or tabs while searching or selecting products or services as it requires more cloud resources and energy. Utilize price comparison sites to make the process faster and simpler. Once you have finished shopping, make sure to close all the windows or tabs you open. Make sure to always leave your shopping cart empty. That way you won't receive emails from the companies with reminders or promotions from the products you have in the cart. If you find the product that interests you but can't buy it right away, add it to the future shopping or wishlist that many e-commerce platform offer. That way you won't have to search again when you are ready to purchase it. Consider all the recommendations we've gone over about energy saving, device usage and digital asset management. This also apply to e-commerce. What I normally do before starting any activity online such as e-commerce is to further think about what I want to buy and to find keywords of how I am going to search for them. Then I think about which e-commerce website or comparison website. I will make my search and prepare a list with the names. And only if I don't know where I can find that product, I use a search engine only when I have a plan of what I'm going to search and how I start implementing it. This way, I can avoid surfing too many webpages and losing a lot of time and energy. Do you already have your own plan for your e-commerce activities? I invite you to start developing it now. You can update it and use it as much as you need.

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