Influencing 78% to Reduce Returns with Carbon Visibility for eComID
Partnering with Vaayu to bring carbon literacy into e-commerce returns and shift shopper behavior through transparent impact data
eComID is a B2B software company providing retail tooling for fashion brands, aiming to reduce unnecessary returns and promote more conscious shopping. By surfacing sustainability insights at the point of purchase and during returns, their goal is to encourage behavior change among consumers. To support that mission, eComID partnered with Vaayu to embed trusted, science-backed CO₂e data into their platform, helping retailers and shoppers understand the real cost of returns.
Quantifying the environmental impact of returns to drive awareness and action
Returns are a major pain point for retailers, both economically and environmentally. Return rates for clothing sold online at a European store had an average rate of 56%, and in sectors such as fashion, average return rates for items bought online were almost 20x higher than those purchased in-store (MIT Sloan).
Still, few consumers understand the full footprint of a return, including additional transport, repackaging, and the high rate of products that end up in landfill. eComID set out to change that. The challenge? Creating clear, accurate impact figures that could be displayed directly in the shopping journey. They needed lifecycle data that was credible and easy to interpret, but without complex integrations or delays to their go-to-market.
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Embedded life cycle data, simplified for shopper decisions
Vaayu provided eComID with CO₂e estimates for returned products, leveraging good-practice logistics modeling and life cycle assessment (LCA) data. The methodology incorporates emissions assumptions based on representative delivery distances and product categories, drawing from Vaayu’s experience in modeling hundreds of millions of retail deliveries.
These insights enabled eComID to communicate the impact of returns clearly and credibly, while supporting more informed customer decisions:
- Displaying carbon impact estimates based on countries and product type, making impact visible at the point of return.
- Educating shoppers through clear, contextualized equivalencies and comparisons.
- Testing early nudging tactics to gauge behavior change, particularly around size bracketing and excessive returns.
While a simple integration, the insights are powerful, offering consumers a new lens through which to view their shopping decisions.
Driving awareness, changing behavior and laying the groundwork for smarter returns
eComID’s current software now includes CO₂e impact visuals powered by Vaayu, with the long-term vision of evolving into a dynamic consumer platform. This will allow users to track return behavior across sites, receive personalized nudges, and build more sustainable habits.
“One returned t-shirt is on average equivalent to 3 kg CO₂e — the same as streaming videos for 75 hours.” The tool is live across select fashion e-commerce sites, and early user feedback suggests that making the environmental impact visible at key moments is helping to inform more conscious choices.
When seeing the eComID tooling in real life, 78% of shoppers said that the targeted green-nudging influenced their decisions
Size bracketing — that is, ordering the same item in multiple sizes and returning the ones that don’t fit as well — was down 21% in retailers using eComID’s tool
Setting a baseline, Vaayu found that returning one t-shirt emits 3 kg CO₂e, equivalent to 75 hours of video streaming, driving 25 km and/or flying 18 km (per passenger)
The impact of returns is one of fashion’s most overlooked emissions challenges. Through our partnership with eComID, we’re putting emissions insights front and center — not just to raise awareness, but to inspire real behavior change that’s already happening. Together, we’re showing that smarter returns are possible when carbon data meets customer education, and when shoppers understand their impact, they are empowered to act differently.