Fighting Climate Change Through E-Commerce | Business with Purpose Podcast EP 253: Dane Baker, EcoCart

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My guest today is Dane Baker, founder and CEO of EcoCart, which makes fighting climate change simple, cost effective and accessible for everyone. 

EcoCart has two products, a Shopify app that merchants can install in their online stores and give their customers the opportunity to make their orders carbon neutral and a Google Chrome extension that calculates and offsets the carbon footprint of your online shopping orders at no cost to you. 

4:32 – Dane 101

• He started EcoCart with a simple mission in mind: to make the fight against climate change easy, affordable and accessible so that everyone can do their part. 

6:32 – What is EcoCart?

• They enable a consumer to offset or mitigate the carbon footprint of their e-commerce orders through environmental projects.

10:26 – Entrepreneurial spirit

• Dane has always had an entrepreneurial spirit and sold avocados door-to-door in fourth grade. 
• He thinks entrepreneurship is a great vehicle for change in the world. The environment has always been the most pressing issue in his mind, and it’s a really tough problem to solve. 

12:43 – Early stages of his business

• Dane became more obsessed with the idea over time and couldn’t stop thinking about it. He wanted to test his hypothesis and see if the business worked. 
• People seemed interested in Dane’s idea, so he got to work building his idea.

18:00 – What he’s learned

• Color, fonts and other visuals are so important to his business and consumer psychology.

23:50 – Is it really free?

• If you install the browser extension and shop online, Dane’s company gets a commission from brand partners they work with. They use that money to buy certified carbon offsets or donate to earth-saving projects. 

27:52 – What has surprised him

• The thing that surprised him most is the percentage of customers that click the box at checkout. On average, it’s 28%. 

33:00 – Get to know you

• What would he like to win a medal for? A triathlon.
• Best vacation? Cancun with his family.

FEATURED QUOTES

We started EcoCart with a simple mission in mind: to make the fight against climate change easy, affordable and accessible so that everyone can do their part.  

I think I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit about me. 

The environment has always been the most pressing issue in my mind, and it’s a really tough problem to solve.

CONNECT:

https://ecocart.io/

ABOUT DANE BAKER: 

Dane Baker is the Founder & CEO of EcoCart, which makes fighting climate change simple, cost-effective, and accessible for everyone. EcoCart has two products: a Shopify app that merchants can install into their online stores to give their customers the opportunity to make their orders carbon neutral, and a Chrome extension that calculates and offsets the carbon footprint of your online shopping orders at no cost to you. Previously, Dane has set out to make the world a better place through entrepreneurial ventures such as limiting materialistic consumption and waste with a peer-to-peer rental marketplace and providing gig-economy workers the wages and benefits they deserve with a first-of-its-kind gig economy employment platform.

Thank you to our partners of the show:

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