Who are CarbonClick?

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.

What is Climate Friendly Cart?

Climate Friendly Cart is a Carbon Offsetting App that can be installed on WooCommerce WordPress 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.

What are Carbon offsets?

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.

How does Climate Friendly Cart work?

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 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.

Why should I install Climate Friendly Cart?

More consumers are expecting to see business step up and help defeat climate change. By helping your customers to carbon offset when making a purchase is one way you can take climate action. It is also a great way to connect with them regarding other things you are doing, 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!

What are customers offsetting with their contribution?

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

Can my customers see where their contributions go?

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.

Where do the contributions go?

After we deduct our margin, and payment fee (see below for details), the remainder is then distributed across a ‘basket’ of projects. The first half goes to a nature-based local project (if available) and the remaining goes to clean energy international projects.

This concept comes from consumer research which shows there’s a strong desire to offset with local projects, but because they are expensive they are also less impactful. Climate change being a global problem, and because we’re all living in the same atmosphere we introduced a carbon basket blend 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 individual projects. We are always adding more projects – let us know if you have any special requests – we’ll do our best to accommodate them!

Can I make a contribution?

Of course! This is an impactful way to take responsibility for unavoidable emissions associated with your business. Get in touch to discuss your needs.

What is my local carbon offset basket?

When installing the plugin, we look up your store’s locale and set a local basket if available. We currently support USA, Canada, 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: 50% nature based and 50% clean energy.

Here are some example baskets:

• 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

Can I decide where my contribution will go?

By default, you get the localised standard basket. We’re always working to make sure that this is the best possible basket.

If you have special requirements, our higher license includes custom basket configurations – this is ideal if you have existing projects you’re supporting (and you want to support them more) or if you have specific needs in regards to your alignment around SDG’s or location of offsets (e.g. you want offset in countries where you have factories).

Will my customers get marketing emails from CarbonClick?

Absolutely not. They will only get a transaction receipt from us and will not ever hear from us again. We are however open to working on a re-engagement campaign to update users on how the carbon offsetting project is going, and get them to return to your store to continue their climate friendly journey.

What do you do with my customers’ emails? Do you store them?

All transactions on CarbonClick are associated to an email. This is so that if a user wants to track their cumulative impact, they can log in to “My CarbonClick” and see their progress. The email is also necessary for sending transaction confirmation emails. All customer data is securely stored in an encrypted database.

What is a great source of facts around climate change?

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.

Can you help me with my sustainability program?

Yes, we can. It’s important to take action on sustainability 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.

Is Climate Friendly Cart available on the WooCommerce App Store?

It sure is, and you can see it here.

Are carbon contributions considered donations?

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

Is there tax on carbon contributions?

No, carbon offsets are zero-rated and appear in your store as a product with no associated tax.

How does billing work?

When first installing Climate Friendly Cart, you’ll register a credit or debit card with us.

First, we’ll charge $5 (or 5 of your storefront currency) to your card to seed your offset credit. As your customers purchase offsets, your offset credit will decrease accordingly. Once your offset credit runs out, we’ll charge your card to top it up. You can set your preferred top up amount from with the plugin admin dashboard.

A monthly subscription fee for use of the Climate Friendly Cart plugin of US$9 per month also applies, which we will also charge to the same card. The first monthly charge will be applied after your 14 day free trial is completed.

How much will it cost me?

You’ll pay nothing for the first two weeks. After this, you’ll be billed $9 USD per month for as long as you want to keep CarbonClick. In addition to this are offsets you collect from your customers, which we collect from you.

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

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

2) Offset charges: When your customers add a carbon offset at the checkout and you collect the payment, we must collect those carbon offset dollars from you. These additional charges will always be equal to the amount your customers added for offsets minus a payment processing fees (2.9%). There are no additional fees or charges from us.

For example: If 10 customers add $2 offsets to their basket, this will consume $19.42 ($20 minus a payment processor’s 2.9% commission) of your offset credit.

My Payment Processor charges (up to) 2.9% commission on all purchases – do I pay this for offsets?

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

How do you make money?

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)
– A 20% margin on offsets – of which 10% is returned to you via Climate Friendly Rewards

What are Climate Friendly Rewards?

We return 10% of the value of carbon offsets sold to your store to you. Read all about Climate Friendly Rewards here.

What about any payment fees?

We deduct your stores Payment Processing fee from the customer’s offsets.

The customer sees this on their transaction detail report.

Is the customer getting a good deal on offsets?

Yes! Our end goal is for the end customer to never pay no more than 10% above the offset retail price. Currently, the customer may pay more than this as we build our volumes.

How do I account for the carbon offsets in my accounting and inventory management systems?

In most cases, effectively you don’t need to do anything as we automatically charge your card for carbon offset while you receive funds for the offsets automatically from your customers. 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 expense account and reconcile this out periodically or deduct it from the WooCommerce fee account you use.
There is no tax on carbon offsets so there is no consideration that needs managing in this sense.

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

How to account for the carbon offsets purchased through your Woocommerce store.

1. This is not accounting advice, but rather information we have collated from how some customers say they treat the accounting of carbon offsets. We recommend you check with your accountant how they want this structured for your particular business.
2. Your bulk purchase of offsets (say $100 at a time) can be coded in many ways – one is into the “suspense account” and then customer payments to you for these offsets is deducted from the “Suspense account”.
3. Depending on your accounting setup, it may  show a small dollar value of tax deductible loss. At a maximum this loss would be the value you have set to pre-purchase ($100 in this case) if nobody purchased any offsets via the store (eg if you purchase this just prior to month end rollover), and at minimum it would show $0 if all the offsets had been sold at your month end just prior to the next purchase being charged.
4. Because this is for carbon credits there is no GST applicable to the transaction, so it is relatively simple from an accounting perspective.
5. There are other ways to set up the transaction coding, and many customers code this fee to either “WooCommerce & related costs” and code the offset revenue to “WooCommerce & related income” without actually recognizing it as a standalone product.
6. Effectively you are the guardian of these carbon credits and you are not making or losing any money on these credits, nor are you net paying or claiming any tax on these credits. You are simply facilitating them as part of your efforts to support the planet, and your customers appreciate this message can be substantiated right down to accounting detail if ever needed.

Do you support refunds?

Yes! Even though once sold, offsets cannot be reversed (to avoid false claims), we are able to re-allocate carbon offsets your customers make on our internal public registry. We also mark it REVERSED on the transaction detail page (See example here).

Therefore, on your end, if an order is cancelled or refunded, we will re-allocate carbon and we will credit your offset balance with the refund amount.

How do I install Climate Friendly Cart?

• Login to your WordPress admin panel
• Go to Plugins -> Add New.
• Enter ‘Climate Friendly Cart’ in the search box.
• Click ‘Install Now’ and follow the instructions.

Alternatively, download the plugin from here if you prefer to manually install.

If you have any issues you can reach our friendly support team at [email protected].

Can CarbonClick install the app for me?

Yes, email us at [email protected] and we’ll get in touch to kick off the process.

What if I have problems during installation?

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

How do I see how many offsets have been sold on my store?

The Climate Friendly Cart dashboard shows how may of your customers have added carbon offsets to their orders.

Can I adjust the offset amount?

Yes. Log into WordPress Admin page and navigate to the Climate Friendly Cart plugin. 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.

Can I change my payment card to a different one?

Yes – Log into WordPress Admin page and navigate to the Climate Friendly Cart plugin and then to the Account tab. Click ‘Update Card’ to enter your new card details.

Where can I see how much offset credit I have?

Log into WordPress Admin page and navigate to the Climate Friendly Cart plugin and then to the Account tab.

Are Climate Friendly Cart colours customisable?

Yes – Log into WordPress Admin page and navigate to the Climate Friendly Cart plugin then Look and Feel. Follow the instructions to adjust the colours of your Climate Friendly Cart. Remember to hit Save!

Can I change where the plugin appears on my store?

The Climate Friendly Cart panel can appear up to three locations

1. On the main cart page
2. On your mini cart (if your theme has one)
3. On the checkout page

You can configure which of these locations is active by logging into WordPress Admin page and navigate to the Climate Friendly Cart plugin then Settings > Widget Location as appropriate.

Does Climate Friendly Cart work in any currency?

Currently, USD, AUD, GBP, CAD and EUR are supported.

Does Climate Friendly Cart work in any language?

Only English is currently supported. Send us an email at [email protected] to request support for your language.