Green e-commerce marketplace

The Green E-commerce Marketplace is a focus of universal e-commerce on the green economy.

E-commerce sustains a rapid growth. And, it is changing how products are bought, sold, and shipped.
As the number of users of e-commerce grows from 800 Million in 2006 to a few billion in the 2010's, the infrastructural challenges related to information exchange increase dramatically. The infrastructure resource requirements of rapid e-commerce growth force technology to adapt aggressively to larger numbers of data connections and data transfers. The adaptation requires the rapid improvements of computer processing speeds and other capabilities and the rapid rephrasing of computational processes. The innovation of capabilities and processes results in the rapid obsolescence of exiting manufactured items, which may be computers, wires, power supplies, etc.

As this fast alteration of information resources progresses, humanity is also faced with global warming. Many believe that global warming is the result of human driven carbon expulsion or is at least exacerbated by it. Any form of commerce can add to the carbon expulsion. Trucks haul goods, workers commute, lights consume power, and computers consume power, to mention a few. Of course, the e-commerce infrastructure is based on computers that consume power. So, e-commerce, which may by itself reduce some consumption by reducing the transfer or use of physical paper or by consumers not journeying to stores, is in itself a consumer of power.

Even as e-commerce grows, the adapting e-commerce infrastructure can synchronously adapt to changing requirements of resource consumption derived from humanities need to minimize carbon consumption.

Creating the Market Place

As of 2008, when there are many forms of e-commerce marketplaces, there are few that can be identified with green e-commerce as a central point of awareness. For instance, some popular, on-line, classified ad systems may have sections for types of cars or types of houses, but might contain no categorization for products for solar home building. Or, one might look for a server farm hosting an e-commerce concern, and while finding many, would find a few whose energy supply is based on renewable energy systems or that take into account power losses resulting from electric power distribution.

Perhaps the current form of many e-commerce concerns is the result of an adaption to the minds of the marketplace. And, so for supply and demand drivers to force an adaption to a green e-commerce marketplace there would be a requirement to popularize it. Perhaps, the existing infrastructure can be used to establish e-commerce enterprises with commitments to green e-commerce goals. (Standards)

Resource Preserving Products

Green e-commerce marketplaces can be forums of exchange for products having to do with renewable resources and sustainability.

Buying and selling used batteries, solar panels, etc. happens today. But, it is not common place. Just as cars have a life expectancy of fifteen years, so do many solar system components. And, just as some people buy new cars and sell their partially used cars, so will there be people who will upgrade solar systems in order to get the newest products, and will sell their older products for reduced prices. Classified ads now have plenty of sections for used cars, which people understand well. But, there are few if any classified ads for the exchange of solar system components. And, the bulk of people do not understand solar systems as well as they understand cars. However, the bulk of people are capable of understanding these renewable energy systems, which are often simpler than cars.

Resource Preserving Information Systems

Interestingly enough, some of the most popular software systems for running communities and organizations wishing to establish green awareness, are themselves not very green. That is, some software in use today is not designed to minimize the use of computational resources. In discussions about how some of these products use resources, people often claim that the speed adaptations being made by computers will fix the problems of resource consumption by the software. However, if software is designed to use less resources, then the software that uses less resources on current technology will still use less resources on future technology. So, in order to provide information systems that use less resources, those systems should be designed for reduced consumption right away.

In the case of web servers for Web 2.0 applications, often efficiency problems are addressed by introducing intermediate servers for load balancing and caching. So, a web page caching server, such as Squid, would be added in front of another server that runs community software. While this does improve efficiency and is in general a good thing, if pages change in correspondence to a rate of user publishing, then even these page servers cannot cache all results. Furthermore, if the community software establishes a publication process in which all new publications are cached, then a server might not have to be added. So, with just imaging that an e-commerce concern might not require two computers to run their operation, one can imagine that one e-commerce concern might run on half the energy for one set of software than for another. So, it may be the case that the design of an information system, the software architecture, may be a factor in reducing the energy consumption of an e-commerce marketplace.

Supply Chain Management for Green E-commerce

One thing that will happen in any e-commerce market place, is that some users will sell things and others will buy things. A sales transaction results in a product being moved from one place to another. Often a truck from a shipping company such as United_Parcel_Service will show up at the seller's house, pick up the product and move it through the shipping company system to the buyer's house. The user's of the e-commerce system leave it up to the shipping company to establish best practices for minimal energy consumption. While UPS is experimenting with using better vehicles for product delivery, Zap and UPS, there is a great deal more to consider in delivering items.

Green e-commerce systems may need to drive the improvements of shipping, warehousing, and item tracking in order to achieve reduced energy in item transfers. Just starting with universal GTIN identification can aid in the loss of products or the erroneous routing of products. Green e-commerce systems could be, ultimately, the initializers of product tracking and preferred route management. Green e-commerce systems could provide a neural network of route consumption calculation where user route consumption awareness could influence user shipping choices. Just as a shipping company could be chosen because of the kinds of vehicles it might have for transfer, a shipping company might be chosen by a user if it can guarantee a minimal energy transfer. Ideally, an e-commerce system would provide calculations based on carrying capacity, weather, warehouse locations, fuel prices, and any number of other criteria. (This is food for thought. It would be nice to find some instances of this.)

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