While it’s essential for the global population to begin consuming less, it’s also important for consumers to shop consciously. Fortunately, online shoppers are beginning to consider the environment as an important factor, which you can see in the gradual year-over-year growth for “eco-friendly products” below.
Source: Google Trends
As customers become more conscious of their shopping choices and their impact on the environment, it’s important that your Shopify site matches their idea of what eco-friendly is all about. This particular audience segment is a staunch proponent of the “green lifestyle,” and has substantial buying power and an immense potential to shape general public behavior.
What Is Green Marketing?
Shopify has a great article on the details of green marketing, but in general, it’s the commercialization of eco-friendly commodities and services. Green marketing can mean different things depending on the context. It can be designing or selling an eco-friendly product with a minimal carbon footprint, utilizing eco-friendly biodegradable wrapping and packaging for shipments, embracing sustainable trade practices, or pairing with third-party NPOs to convey effective messages through Shopify apps that advocate the benefits of eco-friendly shopping habits.
However green marketing applies to your products, it’s important that your Shopify site conveys the importance that the environment plays on your company’s mission. To help you with this, we put together a selection of eco-friendly Shopify themes and apps to make this possible.
Eco-Friendly Themes for Shopify
There are a number of professional-looking eco-friendly themes available for Shopify. The following are our top 5 picks.
Organica
Price: $56
Source: Theme Forest
Organica is a versatile Shopify theme that supports a wide array of sustainable products such as beauty and health, makeup, fashion, jewelry, gardening, and food. The theme is straightforward to install and easily customizable with its adjustable control panel. It’s also responsive and thus can be used on multiple devices with varying resolutions. Based on CSS 3 and HTML 5 technology, Organica offers shop owners an eco-friendly feel to their storefront.
Nursery Plant
Price: $33
Source: Theme Forest
Nursery Plant is an elegant Shopify theme with over 10 attractive premade templates and support for over 100+ customizations. Designed by the TemplateTrip team, it’s a multi-purpose responsive theme well-fitted for multiple devices. You can use it for a diverse range of ecological stores such as nurseries, flower shops, gardening and farming supplies, natural products, arts and crafts, sustainable accessories, and products for minimalists. Whichever template you choose, Nursery Plant is made to provide customers with an eye-catching user experience.
FreshMart
Price: $56
Source: Theme Forest
FreshMart is a bright Shopify theme designed by the Nova-Creative team. The theme is suitable for agricultural and organic produce niches such as agrotourism, organic ingredients, and farming. FreshMart offers a charming and natural look that aligns seamlessly with Shopify’s optimal eCommerce platform. Included are a selection of five customizable homepages, email subscription pop-up functionality, and easy menu navigation designed to showcase a large variety of offerings.
Garden Centre
Price: $55
Source: Theme Forest
Garden Centre comes loaded with amazing functionality such as elegant icons and attractive dropdown menus. The theme guarantees the finest customer experience as well with on-page live search, an easy-to-navigate menu, sidebar filters, and quick add-to-cart pop ups. Garden Centre is excellent for store branding in the home and gardening sector.
Ap Green
Price: $56
Source: Theme Forest
Ap Green is a vibrant theme, appealing to the organic produce niche, such as vegetable and fruit eCommerce markets. Developed by the well-known Apollotheme team, this responsive theme offers extensive customization support and a plethora of features such as five homepage layouts incorporating a unique UI design and a robust admin panel with easy configuration.
Give Back to Nature with Eco-Friendly Shopify Apps
While the above themes can provide the look and feel of a “green” Shopify store, there are even more ways to appeal to your environmentally conscious clientele. By integrating the right Shopify apps into your site, your customers can make a direct impact on fighting climate change. The apps below let you choose from a variety of features such as reducing the carbon footprint of customer orders, donating to a sustainable non-profit charity, or planting trees with each purchase.
Cloverly
Price: Free
Source: Shopify
Cloverly uses algorithms to calculate the carbon footprint of each order. It automatically displays a checkbox in the shopping cart that shows customers the cost of making their order a zero-carbon delivery. For a nominal amount of less than $1, customers can pay to get their packages delivered with null carbon emissions. Customers can also choose to have future deliveries be automatically carbon neutral by selecting the “Always Green” checkbox in the settings. Cloverly makes it possible to make every single order on your Shopify store zero-emission without any cost to you.
Climate Friendly Cart
Price: $9 / Month
Source: Shopify
Climate Friendly Cart is essentially a non-profit crowdfunding project. It gives options to customers to minimize the carbon impact of their purchases as they shop in your store. Customers can choose to donate a certain amount that goes towards numerous carbon offsetting projects, like tree planting and renewable energy projects. Climate Friendly Cart allows seamless and easy integration with your Shopify store and is 100% trusted and transparent.
Offset Earth
Price: $0.15 / tree
Source: Shopify
Offset Earth is a tree-planting campaign built inside a Shopify app. Every new Mangrove tree planted in Madagascar costs only $0.15 (USD), which is billed to you monthly. For every sale made on your store, you can contribute to tree planting and carbon offsetting by donating a small share of your revenue through your Offset Earth profile. This is a great opportunity for start-ups and small businesses wanting to make a difference, even when available funds are limited.
Is Shopify an Eco-Friendly eCommerce Platform?
As online shopping becomes a way of life post-COVID, there is a growing concern about how this massive global increase in eCommerce logistics and shipping as well as the amount of energy it takes to run the data centers that host your Shopify store will affect the environment.
In response to Shopify’s role in increasing carbon emissions, the company has taken several important steps to achieve accountability for its ecological impact.
- Carbon negative commitment of at least $1 million each year for carbon storage
- Carbon-neutral platform through Google Cloud, which is 100% offset with clean energy.
- Carbon-neutral operations that are sourced and offset from renewable energy and carbon credits
- LEED-certified offices — most Shopify corporate offices are rated as LEED Gold or Platinum
Make Your Shopify Store Eco-Friendly for Your Future and the World’s
In order to reverse the effects of climate change, we must each do our part. Fortunately, Shopify offers many ways that you can make a positive impact while still making profit. Be it sustainable, carbon-neutral, or eco-friendly, Shopify offers themes and apps that can give you a voice to endorse and advocate a greener lifestyle.
