E-commerce has lowered the fashion industry’s barrier to entry by allowing aspiring fashion entrepreneurs to find an outlet for their merchandise. As more and more innovative designers and online retailers come onto the scene, they bring new ideas and often push the online fashion world in new directions. Today, disruption through innovation represents a promising driving force for a more sustainable clothing industry.

With the mass adoption of internet commerce during the 2000s, profitable avenues have opened up for fashion retailers. However, the ways e-commerce can potentially benefit the environment through waste reduction are rarely discussed. The clothing industry is one of the most wasteful industries in the world, creating 92 million tons of textile waste every year, not to mention creating large amounts of pollution and carbon emissions. This article will explore how e-commerce can help reduce waste in the fashion industry.

Consumer Choice

By implementing sustainable practices from materials procurement to product delivery, e-commerce businesses in the clothing industry can pressure big fashion players to follow suit. Recent research shows that around one-third of consumers around the world are willing to pay more for a sustainably-produced product. With smaller e-commerce shops leading the way in sustainability, larger corporations will gradually become less able to dominate the market by continuing wasteful practices. 

This is not to say that all e-commerce retail is inherently more sustainable. In fact, most fast-fashion brands also rely on e-commerce. However, e-commerce provides consumers with sustainable clothing options that they wouldn’t necessarily have access to in physical stores in their area. It’s also often easier for customers to do research on the sustainability of a store when shopping online. After all, shoppers are unlikely to pull out their phones and do a deep dive into a company’s sustainable practices while standing in the store with a garment in hand! While it’s true that the environmental costs of shipping are higher for e-commerce stores than local physical stores, the expanded access to sustainable goods that e-commerce creates cannot be discounted. This helps provide sustainable, low-waste online clothing stores with a competitive advantage.

Lower Retail Waste

Other than the 92 million tons of textile waste the fashion industry creates annually, the plastic shopping bags, promotional materials (flyers, catalogs, etc.), and other waste from brick-and-mortar locations add significantly to landfill mass. By removing the need for this excessive waste, e-commerce fashion businesses gain business efficiency while setting the trend for all market players.

Of course, e-commerce still produces waste through packaging for shipping materials. However, e-commerce is uniquely positioned to reduce packaging waste and drive the push for sustainable packaging, as they no longer need to provide eye-catching marketing to attract customers to their product in a sea of shelves. Instead, their web design does much of the work that packaging did previously. Many e-commerce companies are taking advantage of this and beginning to use less packaging around their products.

Bringing Supplier Practices to the Forefront

Many e-commerce clothing businesses are smaller than the stores that rely on sales from physical stores. While this can make monitoring their sourcing and suppliers a bit more difficult as they have fewer resources, it also provides the added advantage of having a smaller supply chain in the first place. This allows for increased visibility into suppliers’ practices, allowing these e-commerce shops to ensure that production occurs efficiently, with as little waste as possible. For example, supplier monitoring can help ensure that only high quality materials are used or that only the correct amount of materials are ordered, leading to significantly lower levels of waste.

In fact, many e-commerce businesses have shorter supply chains than their conventional counterparts, as they’ve begun cutting out middlemen and selling direct-to-consumer. Not only can this reduce waste from unnecessary shipping, but it can help e-commerce retailers keep an eye on their suppliers more easily.

Supplier monitoring has several waste-reducing benefits. First, creating a central repository for supplier information can help ensure that only qualified suppliers are used. This can help avoid using substandard materials, which can lead to waste. Second, supplier quality software can help track and manage supplier performance. This can help identify issues early on before they result in waste. Finally, the software can help streamline communication between suppliers and buyers. This can reduce the risk of errors and miscommunications leading to wasted materials or products. 

E-Commerce: An Ethical and Efficient Choice

While e-commerce in the fashion world has a long way to go to become truly sustainable, it does represent a promising step forward towards making the clothing industry less wasteful. While not all e-commerce stores are more sustainable, e-commerce makes it easier for consumers to research and access stores that are. Reducing the need to travel to the mall for clothes shopping, decreasing the volume of packaging and marketing materials used by brick-and-mortar stores, and supporting companies that carefully monitor their supply chain can also bring measurable change to the fashion industry’s wasteful ways.