Most of what gets written about sustainable shopping is written by people who have never had to onboard a merchant. The marketing language is easy. The contracts, the SKU mapping, the offset accounting, the question of whether a brand's "sustainable" range is meaningfully different from its standard range — that part is harder. We run a marketplace with more than 20,000 partner brands plugged into it, alongside the hotel side of IMPT, and I want to write down what that actually feels like from the inside, because I think the public conversation about ESG retail is missing the operational layer almost entirely.
The marketplace is the easy part to describe and the hardest part to run
On the surface, a green marketplace is a directory. A shopper arrives, picks a brand, clicks through, and a cut of the sale comes back to fund something climate-positive — in our case, on-chain carbon credits that the shopper can hold or retire. That's the pitch. It fits on a slide.
The reality is that every one of those 20,000 brands is its own integration problem. Some have clean affiliate feeds. Some have feeds that update once a quarter and lie about stock. Some sit behind networks that aggregate other networks. Some have an "eco" line that is genuinely lower-impact and a flagship line that isn't, and you have to decide whether you're surfacing the brand or the product. None of that shows up in a press release. All of it shows up in a Monday morning standup.
I spent twenty years building retail systems at Tesco, Dunnes, and Oracle before any of this. The thing that surprised me coming back into retail from the climate side is how little has changed in the underlying plumbing. Product data is still messy. Inventory is still optimistic. The category trees still contradict each other. The difference is that now you're trying to attach an environmental claim to each row, and the claim has to survive contact with a customer who is, rightly, sceptical.
What "sustainable" actually means at the SKU level
One of the first things you learn running a marketplace at this scale is that the word "sustainable" does almost no work on its own. A cotton t-shirt described as sustainable might be organic cotton, might be recycled cotton, might be dyed with low-water processes, might be shipped by air from another continent. Four different stories, one word.
So we've had to be honest internally about what we are and aren't claiming. We are not certifying every product on the platform. We can't. Nobody at our scale can without lying. What we are doing is two things:
- Funding verified carbon offsets, on-chain, out of our own commission, for activity on the platform. The shopper doesn't pay extra. We pay it from our cut. That's the part we can prove.
- Surfacing the brands that have made specific, checkable commitments — and being clearer about which brands haven't.
The second part is where most ESG retail conversations go quiet. It's much easier to say "all our partners are sustainable" than to do the work of grading them. We'd rather grade them and lose a few than claim a uniform halo we can't defend.
The offset side, and why we put it on a chain
The reason every IMPT hotel booking offsets a tonne of CO₂, and the reason the shopping side funds offsets out of commission, is simple: we wanted the carbon claim to be auditable by anyone, not just by us. On-chain credits have a serial number, a project, a vintage, and a retirement record. You can argue about the quality of any specific credit — and you should — but you can't argue about whether it was retired.
That matters because the credibility problem in voluntary carbon markets is not really about the science. It's about the bookkeeping. The same tonne being sold three times is a bookkeeping problem. Retirement that never happens is a bookkeeping problem. Putting the ledger somewhere public doesn't fix the project quality question, but it fixes the double-counting question, which is the part most consumers actually care about when they hear "offset" and roll their eyes.
Twenty thousand brands is a different shape of problem than two hundred
There's a temptation, when you're building a green marketplace, to keep it small and curated. A few hundred carefully vetted brands, all with full lifecycle assessments, all certified to the same standard. That's a respectable model. It's not the one we chose.
The reason is reach. If sustainable shopping only works for the people who already drive an hour to a particular shop, it doesn't move the needle on emissions. The shoppers we need to bring along are the ones who are going to buy the trainers, the laptop, the kitchen appliance, the kid's birthday present anyway. Meeting them where they already shop, and routing a portion of that activity into offsets and into better-graded brands, is a different theory of change than building a boutique.
The trade-off is that you carry brands you wouldn't put on the front page. You build filters. You build grading. You build the editorial layer that says this one, not that one, and here's why. None of that is glamorous. All of it is the actual work.
The hotel side teaches you what scale really costs
The other half of IMPT is hotels. 1.7 million properties across 195 countries, each booking offsetting a tonne. The hotel side has taught me more about the operating reality of climate-positive commerce than the shopping side has, because hotels are where the unit economics get tested every single transaction.
A tonne of CO₂ is not free. Paying for it out of our commission, on every booking, means the model only works if we are disciplined about everything else: the booking flow, the support load, the fraud rate, the cancellation rate. There is no version of this where you wave a wand and the offsets appear. They come out of margin, and margin comes out of operations.
What I'd say to anyone building in this space — and to readers thinking about which platforms to trust — is to ask the boring question. Where does the money for the climate claim actually come from? If it comes from a customer surcharge, fine, but be honest about it. If it comes from the operator's margin, even better, but ask how the operator stays solvent. If nobody can answer the question, the claim is decorative.
Where this goes next, and where the AI fits
The booking and shopping flows we run today are still mostly the shape they've been for fifteen years: search, filter, click, checkout. We're building an AI-native booking agent on the hotel side that should change the shape of that interaction — less navigating, more conversation, with the offset baked in by default rather than presented as a feature. The shopping side will follow the same pattern.
The thing I want to avoid is using AI as another decorative layer. The point of an agent in this context isn't novelty. It's that a shopper or a traveller can describe what they actually want — a long weekend somewhere quiet near a river, a replacement for a kitchen appliance that lasts more than four years — and the system can do the filtering work that humans currently do badly and reluctantly. Most people don't want to spend an evening comparing sustainability ratings. They want a sensible default. Our job is to make the sensible default the climate-positive one.
For Irish readers in particular, that includes the domestic side of travel. If you're thinking about a weekend at home rather than a flight, the platform covers that too — there are eco-hotels in Clonmel and across the country on the directory, and the offset applies the same way it does for a long-haul booking.
What an honest ESG retail conversation looks like
If I could change one thing about how sustainable shopping is discussed in public, it would be the assumption that the consumer is the main lever. The consumer is a lever. They are not the main one. The main levers are the merchants, the platforms, the payment rails, and the offset registries — and almost none of those are visible to the person clicking buy.
So when a marketplace tells you it's green, the right questions are: who pays for the climate claim, where is it recorded, how are the brands graded, and what happens to a brand that fails the grade. If the answers are vague, the marketplace is selling you a feeling. If the answers are specific, you can decide for yourself whether you trust the specifics.
What to do this week
If you're a shopper, pick one purchase you were going to make anyway and route it through a platform that can tell you, in plain language, where the climate money comes from and where it goes. If you're a brand, audit your own product copy and strike out every adjective you can't defend with a document. If you're building in this space, publish your bookkeeping before you publish your marketing. On our side, we're continuing to widen the partner network, push the on-chain offset record out where anyone can read it, and ship the AI booking agent so that the climate-positive option stops being the option you have to hunt for. That's the work. There isn't a shortcut, and I've stopped looking for one.