The main advantage of e-commerce is convenience. You can browse goods from the comfort of your home, compare offers without running from store to store, and get what you want delivered where you want it. However, to continue to enjoy this comfort, we must do more stable.

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

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Sustainability – honest intention or green cleaning?

Most growing businesses tout their commitment to sustainability. It shows awareness of general consumer behavior trends. For example, searching the Internet for durable goods has increased by 71% during the last five years. However, does this mean an actual change in the way products are manufactured and distributed?

Greenwashing – presenting a business practice or product as more environmentally friendly than it is – has been around for decades. Jay Westerveld, who coined the term in 1986, warned evolved greenwashing practices as the 2024 Earth Day marketing campaigns approached. According to him, understanding these new forms of greenwashing is especially important now as the power of AI to disseminate information is growing rapidly.

While AI presents a new set of challenges, today's consumers, especially the digitally native generation, are undoubtedly capable of digging deeper. The growing number of sustainability-related online searches shows that consumers are willing to investigate products rather than make a rush to purchase decision. Thus, even setting aside ethical and environmental concerns, businesses must honestly achieve advertised sustainability goals to maintain attracting customers.

How to make e-commerce sustainable

Instead of using AI to dispense half-truths, brands can use such solutions to gather hard facts that help make e-commerce sustainable and profitable. Several areas of focus are critical for online retailers meaningfully committed to this goal.

Minimizing overproduction by forecasting demand:

Consistently producing far more than you sell usually means bad business. Even when overproduction works financially, like for the big players in the fashion industryproduction data is kept secret, knowing the reputational damage that large-scale malfeasance would bring.

Thus, the most prudent e-commerce strategy is to optimize the supply chain to minimize overproduction. Advanced demand forecasting, esp using ML-based toolsis the most promising way to achieve this.

Many global and local factors influence demand volatility along the supply chain, from promotion and shifting market trends to political events and weather. Many data points covering these and other variables are publicly available online. The key to successful forecasting in e-commerce lies in the ability to extract location-specific public data from various sources.

Competitive advantage in promoting sustainable products:

Durable products can evoke different impressions from customers. Some will consider durability a bonus, while others will suspect that some quality features were sacrificed for it. Online sellers should keep this in mind when choosing how to promote their sustainable offerings in the face of tough competition.

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

Implementation of reusable packaging:

Packaging choices have a decisive impact on the possibility of sustainable e-commerce. Despite constant efforts to go straight reusable packagingeconomic challenges and uncertainties often limit its implementation.

As noted by McKinsey experts, the successful scaling of reusable packaging will require complex research into the economic, environmental and social factors at play. Projecting the necessary infrastructure costs, ensuring that the CO₂ emissions and water consumption of the reuse system do not negate its benefits, and identifying ways to foster cooperation with consumers requires careful planning informed by multifaceted data.

The collected customer sentiment and market data should represent the various geographic locations that the e-commerce retailer covers. Localized research will improve planning decisions when scaling up the switch to reusable packaging and allow local sustainability concerns to be addressed when promoting it.

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Durability of data collection

When it comes to facilitating data-driven e-commerce, the elephant in the room is scale Data collection itself requires a power-intensive infrastructure based on millions of servers running continuously. The optimization of resources and processes enabled by such infrastructures will most likely outweigh their negatives. However, industry leaders must undertake to address the remaining challenges.

In the online intelligence gathering industry, several factors are key to advancing sustainability goals.

1. Companies can avoid waste by collecting only the necessary data points and using the best, most efficient solutions to reduce errors and retries. While collecting e-commerce data is difficult due to the dynamic nature of marketplace websites, following best practices or seeking expert advice will achieve data goals with less effort. Moreover, it will protect resources by avoiding IP bans and saving memory space.

2. Automated web data mining relies on residential proxies. There are millions of user devices connected to the Internet all over the world, and thus, they are already consuming energy. Incentive for equipment owners to rent their unused bandwidth allows more value to be created through shared resources.

3. Data centers that would otherwise be dismantled after serving their purpose, are renewed in the host proxies for public data collection. This extends the life cycle of an already existing infrastructure.

4. Combining off-the-shelf hardware to build reliable and effective web data collection infrastructure reduces the need for companies to build custom solutions. Thus, like a well-functioning public transport system, such infrastructure can be cost-effective for users and help conserve resources.

In an ideal world, which may stretch into the future, companies that collect Internet intelligence and data holders could agree to a free flow of data, waiving anti-scraping measures. While these measures lead to the creation and circumvention of resource-heavy barriers to scraping, the best we can do is to ensure our data collection practices are as consistent as possible.

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Moving to sustainable products and practices in e-commerce is the only long-term option. However, projects that would advance this transition often fail despite honest intentions.

Retailers need time-sensitive and location-specific data to optimize their supply chain and make sustainability financially viable. While collecting data on a large scale can be resource intensive, organizations need reliable information to avoid wasteful decisions. Finding ways to make data collection infrastructure more efficient and sustainable will be crucial to the future of e-commerce.