Inviqa research: Amazon has work to do as UK retailers fail to minimise carbon impact of their websites

Digital product agency Inviqa has measured the carbon impact of the UK websites of 50 leading retailers to demonstrate the role their digital and tech teams can play in delivering sustainable e-commerce.

Combined, the 50 websites benchmarked would require an estimated 1.3 million trees to be planted to offset the carbon generated by hosting the sites and loading the total annual page views on consumers’ devices.

To date, much of the emphasis on making e-commerce operations sustainable has focused on packaging reduction, intelligent delivery routing and the sustainability of the products sold.

Digital sustainability – actively trying to reduce the power requirements and carbon emissions generated by the operation of e-commerce sites – is an additional element that retailers should consider, Inviqa argues.

For this project, it used the Ecoping carbon scoring tool, which assesses sites based on the carbon weight of each page plus Google’s Lighthouse metrics to provide an EcoScore. It also calculated the average carbon weight per page view of each site.

Three types of pages were tested per website to generate each retailer’s average score, and allow us to fairly compare sites against each other when their total page numbers  and page views will vastly differ.

The most digitally sustainable sites per page were Dunelm, Argos and Screwfix.

The top scoring sites achieved 66 out of 100 using Ecoping’s EcoScore measurement. However, retailers should be aiming for a score of 90 or more to be considered truly sustainable e-commerce sites.

Other retailers who featured in the top 10 of the results were: Sports Direct, Moonpig, Hillarys, Victorian Plumbing, WHSmith, Primark and Cotswold Outdoors.

The highest traffic website in the study - Amazon UK - placed in the bottom 10 of the 50 ranked sites with an EcoScore of 39. The bottom scoring site achieved an EcoScore of just 13.

Both technical and design changes can contribute to lowering the carbon weight of website pages, including font, colour palette, image and video formats and ensuring that unnecessary software code is removed.

Using green web hosting and a content delivery network also helps to minimise the power requirements of operating the site and serving web pages (particularly when you have a geographically distributed audience).

Many of the improvements retailers can make to reduce a website’s carbon impact will also have positive benefits for the site’s usability; such as faster page load times.

“We believe that UK retailers want to create sustainable e-commerce operations. 92% of the 50 retailers we benchmarked had sustainability information on their websites. However, there is little awareness of the environmental impact of the energy required to power web experiences and so this has yet to be a real area of focus,” comments Inviqa’s Marketing Director Joanna Perry.

“Measuring your e-commerce site’s carbon impact is the first step to managing it, and then taking steps to actively reduce it. We urge all retailers to investigate digital sustainability and add it to the excellent environmental initiatives many already have in place.”