Inspiring Conversations with Dane Baker of EcoCart

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dane Baker.

Hi Dane, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
EcoCart was founded with the mission to make the fight against climate change easy, affordable, and accessible for everyone. We are leveraging the immense power of digital commerce as a force for good in the world and making the world a more habitable place for our families into the future.

While running a previous company, my co-founder and I realized the difficulties of scaling a business while staying rigorous with sustainability ambitions — everything had an unavoidable carbon footprint and they, like many other businesses, had to prioritize their bottom line as a company over what was best for the environment.

Soon after, we were introduced to the carbon offset market as a means to reduce the environmental effect of the ‘unavoidable carbon footprint’. After much, much research and due diligence, EcoCart was born.

EcoCart is a tool for retailers that gives shoppers an option for a carbon-neutral order at checkout. With the click of a button, shoppers can fund certified carbon offset projects (like planting trees or building wind farms) based on the specific carbon footprint of their order.

Sustainability is now a driving factor in consumers’ purchasing decisions. That’s why the 2,000+ retailers that use EcoCart like Walmart, Zegna, Supergoop!, BarkBox, Olipop, Cuts Clothing, and Enfamil are seeing a massive boost to customer loyalty and engagement as well as up to 22% increase in cart conversion rates.

Now we’re a team of 40 and are excited about our solution becoming standard in the retail landscape. We believe that consumers won’t be able to go through a checkout flow in 3-5 years and not have an option for a carbon-neutral order.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
When we were first starting EcoCart, we wanted to spend the least amount of money as we could to get a minimum viable product up to test our assumptions around whether this was a solution people wanted. So, we worked with a friend to initially build the first version of the Shopify app thinking we were getting a good deal because we weren’t paying nearly as much as other teams were quoting us. The development was supposed to take two months.

During this two months period, I flew to CES in Las Vegas to drum up demand for our solution. I went booth-to-booth explaining to people the benefits of our app and that it would be ready for beta testing in just a few short weeks. Everyone was ecstatic to be able to start using EcoCart and we natively thought that it would be done just in time to satisfy our eagerly-waiting customers.

Well, four months later we were finally putting the finishing touches on our app, then we learned that there was a whole other month-long approval process we’d have to go through. Those two weeks turned into five months and when we went back to those merchants who had all verbally committed had completely forgotten who I was and I had to start from scratch.

As you know, we’re big fans of EcoCart. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
EcoCart is a tool for retailers that gives shoppers an option for a carbon-neutral order @ checkout. With the click of a button, shoppers can fund certified carbon offset projects (like planting trees or building wind farms) based on the specific carbon footprint of their order.

Sustainability is now a driving factor in consumers’ purchasing decisions. That’s why the 2,000+ retailers that use EcoCart like Walmart, Zegna, Dockers, Supergoop!, BarkBox, Olipop, Cuts Clothing, and Enfamil are seeing a massive boost to customer loyalty and engagement as well as up to 22% increase in cart conversion rates.

How do you define success?
Our mission is to make the fight against climate change easy, accessible, and affordable for everyone to be able to make a difference. Our vision is to offset every consumer activity. Success is achieving that and continuing to lead this movement.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ecocart.io/
• Instagram: ecocart.io
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ecocart.io/
• Twitter: @ecocart_io