We’re a small but mighty New Zealand based company, with a vision to make a big impact in the fight against climate change!

We create clever solutions that help people offset the carbon emissions of their purchases. We remove the need for businesses to build their own offsetting programme, by providing everything they need to offer carbon offsets to customers. We power up your climate action.

Climate Friendly Cart is a Shopify Carbon Offsetting App that can be installed on Shopify Stores. It gives customers the power to contribute towards offsetting the carbon impact of their purchase. The app appears on the cart page. Get it here.

Carbon offsets are an effective way to address climate change. When a customer buys a carbon offset it goes towards projects that reduce the carbon in the atmosphere such as funding native forest regeneration or renewable energy.

Climate Friendly Cart works by giving your customers the option to reduce the carbon footprint of their purchase by contributing to quality carbon offsetting projects as they shop. Once Climate Friendly Cart is enabled on your store, customers can click a button on your cart page to add a small additional amount to their purchase. We collect this from you by adding it to your Shopify Bill and channel these funds to our offsetting projects. Your customers get an email receipt from us giving them a “track and trace” number which they can click to see where their funds were allocated.

More consumers are expecting to see business step up and help defeat climate change. Helping your customers to carbon offset when making a purchase is a great way to connect to them, and increase your brand value. It’s an effective tool in any business’ sustainability toolkit – whether it’s your first step in starting your sustainability agenda, or supports the work you’re already doing.

Sustainability is a journey, come on the journey with us!

A contribution guarantees they are reducing the environmental impact of their purchase. However, attributing exactly what the offset goes to is hard to pinpoint exactly because of the complex supply chain behind every product. With very high confidence, freight will be offset for most products that use standard courier services for delivery. Furthermore, a meaningful part of the embodied carbon (carbon emissions related to manufacturing the product) will be offset with the remaining amount. If anything is left over after that, then the customer’s contribution is actually making the purchase climate positive – brilliant!

Here are some typical items and the cost to make them carbon neutral:

Plain T-Shirt: $0.30
Trainers: $0.20
Parcel Delivery: $0.05

Yes, customers who include a carbon offset in their purchase receive a confirmation email from us with a unique traceability link that they can use to get full details of their contribution including the projects it supported. We’ve elaborated further here, where you can see images of the emails we send and the track and trace page many customers visit.

After we deduct our margin, and payment fee (see below for details), the remainder is then split 50/50. The first half goes to a local project (if available) and the remaining goes to international projects. This idea comes from consumer research where there’s a strong desire to offset with local projects, but because they are expensive we’ve made a compromise and added international offsets to bring the price down & and impact per $ up. We explored the option of consumers selecting their carbon offsetting basket mix, but decided on a simpler option as we cannot distract the user on checkout.

See our projects page for further information about the individual projects. We are always adding more projects – let us know if you have any special requests – we’ll do our best to accomodate them!

When installing the plugin, we look up your store’s locale and set a local basket if available. We currently support USA, Australia and New Zealand. If we have no local basket for your country, you get assigned to our high impact basket, which is 100% international.

• USA Basket: 50% Pungo river forest conservation + 25% Clean energy: Solar water heaters + 25% Clean energy: Wind power
• Australian Basket: 50% Yarra Yarra biodiversity corridor + 25% Clean energy: Solar water heaters + 25% Clean energy: Wind power
• New Zealand Basket: 50% Arawera native forest conversion + 25% Clean energy: Solar water heaters + 25% Clean energy: Wind power
• International Basket: 50% Panama reforestation project + 25% Clean energy: Solar water heaters + 25% Clean energy: Wind power

We’ve found the following document excellent from The Center for Climate Change Communication (4C) who conduct unbiased social science research to facilitate public engagement in efforts to limit climate change. Skeptical Science is also a fantastic website with many points/myths explained in simple language.

Yes, we can. It’s important to take action on sustainabilty beyond offsetting and as part of Climate Friendly Cart you get access to a number of resources that are specific to e-commerce.

Looking for more? We support businesses to reduce emissions and build their sustainability agenda. Please reach out to us on [email protected] to find out more.

It sure is, and you can see it here.

No, but we are exploring if this is possible in the future.

When first installing Climate Friendly Cart, you’ll enable Shopify to bill you for your subscription with us and the offsets your customers buy. From there it’s all automated – our charges will appear on your Shopify bill.

You’ll pay nothing for the first two weeks. After this, you’ll be billed $399 USD per month for as long as you want to keep CarbonClick. We will automatically charge you for offsets you sell to your customers and these charges also appear on your Shopify bill.

Here’s a bit more explanation on how the billing works. There are 2 parts to billing: 1) Monthly subscription and 2) additional charges.

1) Monthly subscription: To subscribe to CarbonClick you’ll never pay more than $9 per month.

2) Additional charges: Because your customers add a carbon offset at the checkout and you collect the payment, we must collect those carbon offset dollars from you. These carbon offset dollars will appear as “additional charges” on your Shopify bill. These additional charges will always be equal to the amount your customers added for offsets minus Shopify’s commission (2.9%). There are no additional fees or charges from us.

For example: If 10 customers add $2 offsets to their basket, we will charge you $19.42 ($20 minus Shopify’s 2.9% commission) extra in that billing cycle.

This is because your customers pay your Shopify store directly for the carbon offsets they buy, not us. In order to get the funds for the offsets, we charge your Shopify account. To do this, we need to get authorisation from you.

No. We deduct this from from the amount we charge you.

To be successful and deliver impact on a global scale, our business needs to be sustainable. We need to cover costs like cloud credits, wages, quality assurance, legal and administration costs. Our fees are:

– $9 USD monthly subscription (After a free trial)
– We buy Carbon Offsets for a 10% discount on market prices. We sell the offsets at market price and use the 10% to fund our program.

Read all about Climate Friendly Rewards here

We deduct Shopify’s margin/payment fee from the customer’s offsets.

The customer sees this on their transaction detail report.

Yes! Our goal is for the end customer to pay no more than the market rate. We therefore negotiate volume discounts with our brokers to ensure customers get carbon credits at or below market rates.

In most cases, effectively you don’t need to do anything as you collect the is billed from you or in cases like Shopify, they deduct it and transfer it to us within the same cash cycle. There is no profit or cost from the offsets to you, as your customer is purchasing the offset and you are just collecting that money and passing it back to CarbonClick.
If you have an inventory management system you could list the offsets as a zero value inventory item and add enough stock to stop the system throwing low stock warnings.
And lastly You can recognize the transactions in the suspense account and reconcile this out periodically or deduct it from the Shopify fee account you use.
There is no tax on carbon offsets so there is no consideration that needs managing in this sense.

For more details on how to track carbon offset charges in Shopify, see here

All accountants will treat this differently so please check with yours as to how they want to treat it in your specific case.

Installation is easy. Follow this link and follow the instructions. There is also a video to help. If you have any issues you can reach our friendly support team at [email protected].

Yes, during the installation process, you can request for CarbonClick to install the plugin for you. Click here to get started and Select “Get CarbonClick to do it” when you see this option.

Email us on [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help.

You may notice our Carbon Offset product in your store’s product catalogue.

If you’d prefer it doesn’t appear on your store, watch this video.

Notes:

1. It is imperitive that the ‘all products’ collection is named “All”. Otherwise, the Shopify internal collection will not get overwritten and the Carbon Offset product will remain visible.

2. if you have a collection titled ‘All’ already, then simply add the Product vendor rule to this collection.

Follow the steps in this video to exclude the Carbon Offset product from Flexify.

Follow the steps in this video to exclude the Carbon Offset product from Google Shopping.

Follow the steps in this video to exclude the Carbon Offset product from Klaviyo.

You may notice our Carbon Offset product in your store’s product catalogue.

If you’d prefer it doesn’t appear on your store, follow this steps to remove it:

1. Log into the Shopify admin for your store.

2. Go to Products > Collections.

3. Click “Create Collection” with the title ‘All’ (if you have a collection titled ‘All’ already, then skip this step).

4. Create a rule for this collection:

Product vendor is not equal to Carbonclick.

5. If you have other collections, add the same rule to these.

6. Last, go to Products > Carbon Offset > Search engine listing preview > Edit website SEO and remove the SEO URL by unchecking the “Create a URL redirect for carbon-offset” checkbox that appears after clicking into the ‘URL and handle’ box and hitting any key.

Inside Shopify admin, use the Shopify Sales Report by Product and create a filter on the Climate Friendly Cart product which is called ‘Carbon Offset’. See here for more details.

The app permissions we request are the minimum set required to enable our app to function. Of the 28 possible data points an app can request access to, we request 5.

These are:
1. Modify products, variants, and collections – Why? Our Carbon Offset is represented as a product in Shopify, no different to your products – when a customer clicks the button on the cart page, the carbon offset product is added to their cart. So our app needs this access to create the product.

2. Read products, variants, and collections – Why? Same as 1

3. Read orders, transactions, and fulfillments – Why? When your customer completes a purchase that includes a carbon offset, our app needs to receive a notification that this order has occurred so that we can allocate the purchase to a carbon offset and trigger the offset confirmation email to the customer.

4. Modify theme templates and theme assets – Why? In order for our app to appear on your store, we must inject some code into your theme.

5. Read theme templates and theme assets – Why? Same as 4

The most sensitive data we access is the order data. Note that, in order to appear on the Shopify App Store, we must comply with EU GDPR privacy rules, which are the most stringent in the world – we have implemented this compliance and as part of the app store approval process with Shopify, our compliance was tested and confirmed by Shopify.

Yes. Log into Shopify and navigate to Apps > Climate Friendly Cart. On the Settings page, change the value of Offset Amount to any value between 1 – 100 and click Save. The updated value will immediately be reflected on your cart page.

Yes – Log into Shopify and navigate to Apps > Climate Friendly Cart > Look and Feel. Follow the instructions to adjust the colours of your Climate Friendly Cart. Remember to hit Save!

Yes, we support all of Shopify’s store currencies.