Shopping or ecommerce: which pollutes the most? Amazon’s recipe ahead of October’s Prime offers

“On the last Prime Day, people bought over 300 million products worldwide and a total of 1.7 billion dollars saved: it was the biggest ever ”. And let’s hope the next one is even bigger. Which is not something he told us Claudio Marchese, Amazon’s European manager for Prime productsbut it’s safe to imagine he was thinking during our chat with him.

With “the next”, when it comes to discount days on Amazon, today we mean Prime Exclusive Offers, an initiative reserved for paying subscribers and scheduled for 11 and 12 October: “We have thought of another way to reward our customers”, Marchese replied when we asked him the reason for these new two days of discounts, which will not replace the now traditional ones. Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday (scheduled for November 25th and 28th this year) and not even on Prime Day.

Impossible not to think that it is also a way to be forgiven by customers, after the last increase in the cost of the annual subscription: “We understand that it is not an easy time, but we have also seen that people take advantage of the advantages of the Prime plan more and the results continue to be satisfactory,” Marchese explained to us. In short, the company has no signs of a drop in renewals or registrationswhich around the world are about 200 million.

What will be on offer in the two days of offers

It is certainly thanks to the fact that today Prime includes many more services than 10 years ago, but it is also thanks to the initiatives such as the various Prime Days, Cyber ​​Monday and Prime exclusive offers. We tried to let us anticipate some details on what the discounts will be and above all on what, but we only managed to get us to say that “there will be many offers on Amazon Basics products in the household, sports, electronics and furniture sectors, with the Movian brand “and above all that” there will be specific offers on iRobot deviceseven on a new device that washes and vacuums, just arrived on the market ”.

Marchese reminded us that a good way to get to know them a little in advance is keep an eye on the Amazon Early Access pageand when we pointed out the many criticisms that the e-commerce giants receive for the impact on the environment of their activities, we did not find him unprepared: “There are recent analyzes, such as that of the consulting firm Oliver Wyman (this is it, ed) who explain that e-commerce actually has fewer environmental consequences than traditional shopping – he told us – If the millions of people who buy online went to buy offline, in stores, they would generate between 1.5 and 2.9 times more emissions of greenhouse gases”.

That said, and despite the fact that other statistics show that “the traffic generated by those who make the deliveries represents about 0.5% of traffic in large urban centers”, Amazon is well aware of the problem:“ Using images, videos and reviews, we try to give customers as much information as possible so that they make an informed and successful purchase, so as to reduce the need to return the product ”. And therefore reduce the pollution caused by continuous shipments back and forth.

Not only that: “In Europe we have in our catalog by now over 100,000 Climate Friendly certified productsthat is, guaranteed by 35 third-party certifications regarding their efficiency from an environmental point of view “, from the point of view of design and production.