This blog post is a follow-up posting to my teammate’s prior blog posting (see Shauli Raz).

After reviewing a diverse selection of green opportunities with eBay, our Haas team has decided to pursue a comprehensive program of initiatives that are aligned with the goal statement, “the greenest box is the box that already exists.” The team derived this statement from eBay’s recent reuse campaign, “the greenest product is the product that already exists” (http://green.ebay.com/). The Haas team selected three initiatives to examine in detail and presented our findings to eBay. These initiatives included:

  • Near-term: improve online communication regarding green shipping practices
  • Medium-term: improve the branding of the existing eBay-USPS cradle-to-cradle box
  • Long-term: explore developing a reusable box

In this blog post, I’ll discuss the medium-term initiative in detail. eBay has made tremendous strides in the area of green shipping through partnering with USPS to create a suite of cradle-to-cradle certified boxes. These boxes are available to sellers for free on eBay.com (http://ebaysupplies.usps.com/).

The goals of the branded box initiative as created by the Haas team are to:

  • Increase understanding of the environmental benefits of using eBay’s cradle-to-cradle box
  • Increase adoption of the cradle-to-cradle box
  • Increase customer and sellers awareness to eBay’s green initiatives by utilizing the C2C shipping box as a brand enhancement vehicle

While eBay’s current work on the box is impressive, there is room for improvement. Research indicated that consumers are not aware of the cradle-to-cradle box and that the box’s messaging could be improved. For example, the average consumer does not recognize the cradle-to-cradle brand. Marking the package with the recycle logo or providing information about cradle-to-cradle could improve the effectiveness of the box in terms of communicating the sustainable nature of the materials used to produce it. Packaging is an important customer touch-point and eBay can help sellers show their sustainability prowess through improving the content of the existing eBay-USPS box.

—katieh

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