Green Retailing 3.0: An Interactive World of Green Internet Shopping

In the past few days, we’ve seen a lot of bleak stories about how the retail industry is struggling to make ends meet due to consumers limiting their spending. Dire predictions have been made about the many outlets that won’t survive the season, as people do everything they can to save money – including not buying anything at all. But, even as most mainstream retailers resort to desperate measures for sales, the green retail industry is seeing growth.

Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger, wrote about how the green retail industry can continue to beat the odds, and proposes a quick shift to ‘green retailing 3.0’. From The Huffington Post:

So how about leap-frogging to green retailing 3.0? This would combine the best of two worlds - the well-developing empire of Internet-based e-commerce and an expanded universe of truly well-designed and quality-made green goods. An example of an early attempt at this is the Green Home online store, and the UK’s Green Store.

However these, and really most e-commerce sites, have been hampered by an inability to give people a full shopping experience. But that is starting to change. Look at Zoomii, an online bookstore that copies Amazon’s pricing and shipping policies but lets you browse the bookshelves. Perhaps It won’t be long before your own (realistic) Second Life avatar can go in to a virtual store and try on the organic t-shirt and jeans you’ve been needing.

Seem far-fetched to think that those vast tracts of land now taken up by the behemoth buildings we call “malls” can be replaced by online sites and distributed networks of green suppliers? Well, E-bay probably seemed like a crazy idea not too long ago.

Hill points out that brick-and-mortar neighborhood stores with a green theme typically don’t have a great selection, and we can’t depend on mega-retailers to go green in any meaningful way, no matter how they might attempt to pander to environmentalists.

There are pros and cons to both local shopping and internet shopping, and that won’t change no matter how fancy and interactive online storefronts might become. Earth 911 has a rundown on the battle between online vs. local in-store shopping.

Hill’s ‘green retailing 3.0’ idea is intriguing, though. We’d certainly love to see the world of online shopping get a lot greener, and in order to do that on a large scale, stores need to entice even mainstream consumers to buy their merchandise.

Link [The Huffington Post] + [Earth 911]

Related Posts:

Wisconsin Towns Could Print Local Money to Encourage Local Spending
Sound the Alarms! Treehugger Bought an SUV
The Internet Saves 10 Watts of Energy for Every Watt it Uses
A Green Wal-Mart? Not So Fast…
Natural, Organic, Ecocert – Which Eco-Labels Can You Trust?