In the BMUV-Community-Convention "Let’s think online shopping sustainably!” on 11/24/2022 Prof. Dr. Richard Geibel, head of the E-Commerce Institute Cologne, and Dr. Otmar Lell, project manager at ConPolicy presented technical approaches for more sustainability in online trade.
Dr. Otmar Lell provided information about the ZuSiNa project of the institutes ConPolicy, DFKI, Fraunhofer CERRI and Fraunhofer ISI, which is funded by BMUV. In particular, the project aims to provide a technical solution so that sustainability information is more readily available in online commerce than is currently the case. Currently, information about the certification of products is often not available in a digital form that online stores and comparison portals can easily integrate into their offerings. For this reason, the researchers at ZuSiNa are developing a data interface that can be used to retrieve current certification information from label organizations. This can save costs for online stores and comparison portals, which are currently incurred by the manual research of certifications, and the sustainability information for consumers will be improved.
In the discussion that followed, the consumption-enhancing incentives of online commerce were debated on the occasion of "social commerce" - marketing products directly via social media platforms such as Instagram. Some contributions emphasized that limiting consumption is essential to achieve environmental goals and that environmental policy must in this respect also offer answers to such developments.
Further information on the project can be found here.