When considering a new web site, you may not even think about the positive impact it may have on the environment.  You should, as a strategically planned, well-thought-out site can give you a dramatic edge on reducing consumption of resources, creation of emissions, and saving time and staff resources, as well as giving you an edge over your competitors.

Internet Supporting Print

Company brochures can look fantastic, yet are complex to put together.  They take a lot of time to create, cost a lot to print and are often out of date once they are off the printer.  Aside from this, there are the hefty environmental costs: paper processing from wood pulp, shipping to the printer, the print process itself and wastage, packing into boxes, distribution to the client, delivery to the end-user.  All along the way, there are resources being consumed and emissions being created.

Not everyone can afford high quality, high-end print, nor do many smaller businesses need it.  If your business has to rely on printed material, you can specify that the print be done on 100% recycled stock, but you may view that this is too expensive and that the finish is not quite what you would hope for.  Alternatively, try reducing the printed number and have your web site do the rest, especially as your brochures will already be mentioning the web address:

• An on-line brochure appearing on a web site is about as efficient as it gets.  Once designed, it only requires uploading.  To view, a visitor clicks on the link.  They can then print as few or as many pages as they need, if they need to print them at all.
• A brochure web site is also highly efficient.  Each section is laid out, as one would expect to find with the contents of a book, and just as intuitive.  All the relevant sections have buttons linking to them, and the content within each section has concise text, rather than War & Peace!
• Giving your site plenty of mechanisms for contact, will ensure that visitors arriving are given many opportunities to ‘click here’, thereby helping you to communicate efficiently with them.

Internet Supporting the Sales Effort

Traditionally, good business has been built on the strength of personal relationships between buyers and sellers.  This is still important today, but once initial trust and rapport has been established with a client, much of the ongoing business processes can be improved by taking advantage of the Internet.

The majority of sales people are highly motivated individuals who thrive on pressure and are motivated by targets.  Most are more than happy to win new clients and develop profitable business relationships, but dislike paperwork intensely.  Supporting a salesperson with an on-line ordering system could help a sales force in more ways than you might think, plus the following could actually start to benefit the company:

• Reduce fuel expenses for small and repeat orders
• Reduce fatigue and potentially accident claims
• Reduce emissions
• Reduce road congestion
• Increase speed and efficiency of the order process

Internet Supporting High Street Retail

Humans will always want to trade face-to-face, it’s a natural part of our social and business lives, and in many cases absolutely necessary, however, selling directly to customers is also a costly process; showrooms, lighting, heating, shop staff, rates, etc.  Consider how much wastage can be reduced through e-commerce:

• Delivery of your shopping.  Compare one driver in one car making two journeys (one there, one back) for one load of shopping, against one driver, in one van making up to 20 deliveries in one journey.  Delivery to your door saves between 40% and 90% less fuel than if you drive to the shops yourself (Joseph J. Romm, 1999).  Amazon.com, when compared to high street book retailing has a reduction of 16 to 1 less energy used, per book sold!
• Is delivery even necessary?  At last, the music industry has realised the benefits derived from the Internet, instead of damning its existence due to the file-sharing boom!  They have learned that the uptake in portable media is the perfect catalyst for changing the way music is marketed and the way it is purchased.  Instead of shopping for CDs, people are now downloading their tracks and albums at a rate that could not be predicted two years ago.  Think, less manufacturing of disks, inserts, cases, less distribution; the knock-on effects are enormous.

Embracing e-commerce within an existing business, will give your customers an alternative route to purchasing from you.  With new businesses, e-commerce will allow lower set up costs, more flexibility of where to operate the business from, and lower operating costs.

A well-developed e-commerce site can process orders with such efficiency that all the owner of the site has to do is to print out the packing slip and send the item!

Even businesses that normally trade through approved account can benefit from e-commerce.  Sites set up to enable orders to be placed up to a set credit limit for an individual customer are straight forward, and could provide for a slicker, more accurate sales process.  This can enable sales staff more time to deal with new business, or the needs of existing clients who still need
‘face-to-face’ contact, thereby tailoring the needs of the customer to suit their preferences and creating a more flexible business methodology.

Conclusion

Companies that turn to the Internet and embrace its potential, are putting themselves ahead of their competitors, as ultimately the majority of business transactions will at some point be able to be concluded this way.  Efficiencies are created because many of the processes are automated, and cost savings can be returned.  These efficiencies in turn, can start to ‘knock-on’ to other processes within a business, propelling the effect across the entire organisation, and into the environment, thereby helping a business to do its fair share in addressing climate change.

For more information on what you can do as a business to make a difference environmentally, please visit:

http://www.dti.gov.uk/sustainability/
http://www.carbonfootprint.com/
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/upload/POSTpn212.pdf

Skylight Media Environmental Policy