Shipping impact

In 2014 we made a great effort to deepen our understanding of the greenhouse gas impact of marketplace shipping.

While we don’t ship goods directly, we do facilitate their shipping through our marketplace. Significant improvements in our data sample size, and more detailed analysis methods, enabled a more accurate picture of our 2014 emissions from shipping. We applied this new methodology to recalculating our 2013 emissions and have restated last year’s total. For more information about methodology updates, please see the data transparency section of this report.

Our total greenhouse gas emissions from shipping is up 28% over last year, as the number of transactions and shipments have grown.

We also look at our emissions per shipment to better see what is driving the growth in our emissions in this category.

In 2014, our emissions per shipment increased by only 3% which can be partially attributed to the fact that lower-emission, intra-country shipments are growing faster than cross-border shipments. An increase in sales of digital goods (e.g., dress patterns), which don’t have shipping emissions associated with their purchase, contributed to a slight decline (less than 1%) in emissions per transaction.