Carbon offsetting tools for ecommerce platforms

Compensate is creating a system that allows people and businesses to understand their climate impact and compensate for the emissions they can’t avoid. Ecommerce plays a key role in people’s purchasing habits, which is where the collaboration with Columbia Road came in.

Key objectives

Ecommerce platforms are a major part of modern purchase flows and have a huge reach amongst consumers and online retailers. Compensate has always believed that offsetting has the greatest impact when implemented within purchase flows at the moment of purchase. The goal was to create a technical solution that could eventually be scaled to every digital platform to support systemic change. To get started, we chose the largest ecommerce platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.

Our approach

We started by clarifying the concept: creating the best user experience for both the online retailers and the end-users and identifying the key functionalities and business requirements for a minimum viable product (MVP).

Columbia Road brought in its expertise in different ecommerce ecosystems, platform technical requirements and review processes. Taking the MVP approach, we started with the minimum requirements to launch the first plugins, learning and scaling as we gathered feedback.

Together with Compensate, we planned the technical solution to be scaled on all digital platforms in the future. From an architecture perspective, it was a really interesting challenge to build a model for this complex setup.

The end product was an ecommerce plugin for Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento. The Compensate plugin calculates the climate impact of the customer’s order and shipment when an item is added to the cart. In the shopping cart or during checkout, customers will see a checkbox enabling carbon-negative delivery. Compensate does not take any cuts from the customers’ compensation payments but uses them in full towards carbon capture.

The software built could be used for various ecommerce applications and services. The end product also had to support multiple payment solutions. On Shopify, we had to apply their billing solution, but for the rest, we built our subscription and usage billing solution using Stripe. Our platform solution also needed to adhere to strict privacy regulatory requirements, such as GDPR.

The project was a complex undertaking and required active participation across the organisation. The team comprised Columbia Road’s ecommerce platform advisors, a technical project manager, developers, and a designer. On Compensate’s end, product, tech, sales and marketing, and legal teams were involved in the process.

Impact

As a result, we successfully launched the Compensate ecommerce plugins for Shopify, WooCommerce and Magento. This solution makes it easier for online retailers and their communities to take action for the climate.