TL;DR
I'm conducting market research for a Shopify App that can show online shoppers a simple and understandable carbon emission rating for individual products on the product page in order to meet the unmet demand for trustworthy sustainability information. Please leave a comment with your feedback on my idea and whether or not you think it fits current needs. All ideas are welcome!
Problem
The retail ecommerce market currently suffers from greenwashing. Out of good and bad intentions, many companies promote misleading, unverifiable, and sometimes even false claims about the sustainability of their products in order to appeal to the growing demand for greater ESG transparency to consumers for the products they buy.
And the demand is definitely there, a survey by GreenPrint found that 64% of Americans willing to pay more for sustainable products, but 74% don’t know how to identify them.
Solution
The solution I propose is to create a single third party source of truth for company sustainability information. This would be a downloadable Shopify app called Earthmo that provides a simple and understandable product carbon emission rating and breakdown that consumers can see right on the product page before they click add to cart.
The tool is meant to partner with and reward companies that take their environmental impact seriously by cutting through the greenwashing fog and connecting them to a larger, more loyal user base of consumers that want to buy sustainable products right now, but either can't find them or don't know who to trust.
How it would work
- An environmentally conscious shoe store, for example, downloads Earthmo in the Shopify app store and onboards by providing all supply chain emission related data that they have available
- Emissions data gets verified, then the merchant receives an emissions assessment report that tells them what they're doing good and bad, and how they compare to the emissions industry average for shoe stores
- When a consumer enters the site, they see a promotional messaging on homepage to inform them of partnership and what it means
- When the consumer gets to a shoe product page, they see the Earthmo widget below the price with a badge of approval, just like when a medication gets the FDA stamp of approval, along with a message: "This store has done their part by sharing their emissions data. You can buy with the confidence that these shoes are a more sustainable option than higher emitting competitors"
- The consumer also sees a button, "click to see product rating". The rating is 1-5 star scale that clearly explains: 1 star means the carbon emitted to make the product is at the industry average, while 5 stars is perfection, which means that the bare minimum amount of carbon was emitted and that the product is as sustainable as possible.
- The consumer is more likely to check out when they see that the company is transparent with emissions data and can trust that they are buying a product with lower than average carbon emissions
- The consumer learns to look for the Earthmo stamp of approval before they buy.
- Earthmo can promote the shoe store through it's native site and marketplace and drive traffic from new shoppers looking for eco friendly shoes to the site that wouldn't have otherwise known about it.
I believe that by making it easier for retailers to report their emissions, this tool can fundamentally shift the narrative from climate impact being seen as a cost center, to climate impact as a growth driver and a new field of unexplored partnerships and marketing opportunities.
If you are a Shopify merchant, do you have a pain point in this area and think that you could benefit from a tool like this? Or do you think instead that it wouldn't work, or maybe that it doesn't actually address your current needs?
Thank you for reading! I would greatly appreciate any and all feedback.
