Evergreen portfolio

Transportation

Reducing and offsetting emissions caused by transport vehicles

A semi-trailer truck drives through a forested landscape.

Carbon reduction

9% of fund spend

The world is a big place, and people like to move things around. Transportation is, and will always be, essential for humans. Much work still needs to be done to reduce the amount of carbon emitted from all modes of transportation, including cars, boats, buses, and planes.

As a commerce company, we are incredibly proud to enable millions of merchants to sell and deliver products internationally. But there are some negative side effects that come from this that we can’t ignore.

In 2019, Shopify merchants shipped 1.1 billion packages that travelled over one trillion kilometers. That distance would take you around the Earth 25 million times. It would take you from the sun to Neptune, the farthest planet in our solar system, and back—100 times over.

Every shipped package emits roughly one kilogram of carbon into the atmosphere. This calculation isn’t an exact science, but our data team came to this estimate based on factors like average travel distance, travel method, and package weight.

One of the goals of Shopify’s Sustainability Fund is to enable our ecosystem to make climate-conscious decisions. If even a small number of Shopify’s one million merchants thinks more deeply about their environmental impact, it could lead to a global sustainability movement.

That’s why we launched options for our merchants and their buyers to offset the carbon emissions from their order deliveries.

Shopify apps

Shop

Shop is a digital shopping assistant app that makes it easier to discover and track online purchases. This app is a big step toward our mission to make commerce better for everyone, including our planet. Shopify automatically offsets 100% of delivery emissions from every order purchased through Shop Pay, at no charge to Shop users or the merchant.

Within the Shop app, you can track and visualize your individual carbon offset history and see the overall impact of the Shop community. Within its first few months, Shop has protected the equivalent of 15 million trees through our carbon offset purchases from Pachama, offsetting more than 12,000 tons of carbon emissions from nearly 50 million orders.

The goal here is to make it automatic and easy to minimize the carbon footprint of ecommerce orders. We want to normalize this process and make carbon offsetting an essential part of the online purchase experience.

“By using Shop, you can feel good about supporting the brands you love and reducing negative impacts to the environment.”

—Carl Rivera, Shop General Manager

Shop

For every order purchased through Shop Pay, Shopify will offset all delivery emissions.

Download Shop

Shopify apps

Offset

While Shop is a solution for online shoppers, the Offset app is built specifically for Shopify merchants. Offset gives merchants the option to neutralize their shipping emissions and proudly tell their customers that they’re an environmentally friendly business.

Every month, Offset calculates the total emissions from a merchant’s shipments, and that number becomes their monthly Offset cost. The price is low—a few cents or less per order—and that payment goes toward forest protection projects brokered by Pachama. From the Offset dashboard, merchants can see the total amount of shipping emissions they’ve offset, including how many trees they’ve protected. This allows merchants to offset shipping emissions from all orders, not just those through Shop Pay, and our team makes sure there’s no double counting of offsets between the Shop and Offset apps.

Shopify offers verified, affordable, and innovative carbon offsets so that our merchants don’t need to spend time and effort researching options themselves.

Offset

A Shopify app allowing merchants to opt-in to offset the shipments of all of their deliveries.

Download Offset