In the second and final part of his series on whether e-commerce really is as green as the industry would like us to believe, Dave looks at whether online shopping is helping to bring down car-miles and emissions.

How much could e-shopping reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

A study focussing on e-grocery shopping by Finnish researchers, Siikavirta, has suggested it is theoretically possible to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions generated by grocery shopping by 18% to 87% compared with the situation in which household members go to the store.

The researchers estimated that this would lead to a reduction of all Finland's greenhouse gas emissions of as much as 1%, but in reality the figure is much lower since only 10% of grocery shopping trips are online.

Another study, for the UK, shows the importance of grocery shopping – it estimates that car travel for food and other household items represents about 40% of all UK shopping trips by car, and about 5% of all car use. It considers that a direct substitution of car trips by van trips could reduce vehicle-km by 70% or more.

However, I believe savings won’t be significant since online grocery shopping has proved one of the least popular forms of online shopping.

If you look at the sales of Tesco.com, the UK market leader in home shopping, sales for 2005 rose by 32% year-on-year, but they still only represent over 3% of its UK sales of £32.7bn!

On a positive note, Tesco has committed to a £100m technology investment to help it become more environmentally sustainable. This includes installing wind turbines at some stores.

E-shopping fulfilment problems

Many readers will have faced the problem of missing a delivery for an item bought online. This is not only annoying and costly for everyone, but gives rise to additional journeys from the delivery company resulting in more emissions.

The problem is perhaps not as bad as you might expect as a percentage of all deliveries, but it is still costly.

The IMRG estimates that around 12% of deliveries fail the first time, resulting in costs of around £300 million for the retailers, £123 million for the couriers and even £259 million for the consumers if you cost out time for sorting out the problem.

The report estimates that typically it costs 15% less for a business to trade online compared to operating high-street outlets and this is what gives rise to typically lower prices online. However, by reducing the amount of delivery failures, potentially online trading could be still more cost effective.

Can the e-retailers do more to avoid these missed deliveries? A report by Snow Valley (2005) shows that potentially they could through offering more choice. The report showed that:

• 43% of retailers did not offer any delivery options, compared to 46% in 2005
• relatively few retailers have specific date options (81%) or time of day options
• 24% offered Saturday delivery in 2006, compared to 23% in 2005

However, larger retailers were more likely to offer specific date, time, or Saturday delivery options so it is worth considering these if you want to avoid the frustration and those wasted trips.

The unedited version of this article, citing all references, appears on Dave Chaffey's e-business and web marketing website.

Dave also offers online advice on email marketing in his Email Marketing Strategy Guide