Ethical Online Shopping

Ethical online shopping in the UK 

This guide to ethical online retailers is part of our Amazon Alternatives series, designed to help you avoid using Amazon where possible. All of the brands in this guide are better alternatives to Amazon, so although there are some brands who score much lower down the table, all of them have more ethical credentials than Amazon.

Our previous online retailers guide came out in November 2021, just as the Omicron variant threatened to shake up the dust that was still settling from previous lockdowns. Two years later and online spending remains high, with 56% of UK consumers stating that they spend more online than they did pre-pandemic and that they’ll continue to do so. Amazon’s expansion too shows no signs of slowing, but its attempts to clean up its act are too little, too late. It’s crucial that we support alternatives that are, if not fully ethical, at least less harmful.

It’s possible that Amazon’s market successes and ethical failures can be attributed to the same thing – its monopolistic ambition to sell absolutely anything. Can an ethical retailer reasonably hope to compete with Amazon’s sheer scale of product availability without compromising somewhere down the line? Different sectors come with their own ethical challenges, and, as people trying to live ethically will know, even sustainably minded companies often fall short in their chosen specialisms. Being an ethical generalist is no small task.

Moreover, Amazon Prime has basically trained consumers into thinking of free, fast shipping as an additional human right. Smaller companies are forced into competing on Amazon’s terms, but generally lack the logistics networks to do so cost effectively.

As such, many smaller and more ethical online alternatives have collapsed since we first published this guide nearly a decade ago. Traidcraft, a Fairtrade pioneer since 1979, went into administration in January 2023, and previous Best Buy Wearth has now merged with Veo.

The ethical online shops in this guide

Most of the ethical alternatives in this guide are not generalists in the sense that Amazon is, and none of them can compete with the Bezos machine in terms of convenience. We have tried instead to cover as many of Amazon’s main product areas as possible: the accordion list of brands below outlines what each company sells.

We have many other shopping guides for particular products like clothes or food, so for this guide we’ve primarily selected companies that straddle a number of sectors, but a few are more specialised – Richer Sounds and Back Market focus on electronics, while Green Stationery does what it says on the (stationery) tin.

Others are attached to charities: Viva!, the Amnesty Shop, and Oxfam use their retail arms to raise funds for their charitable and advocacy work. Social Supermarket, Veo, Shared Earth, and the Ethical Shop promote suppliers that are themselves either charities or social enterprises, and offer a wide range of fair trade goods.

We’ve included the lower-scoring John Lewis, Etsy, and eBay because they are somewhat nearer to competing with Amazon’s sheer breadth of product options. Whilst they each face their fair share of ethical issues, they easily remain better than Bezos. John Lewis remains employee owned and has significantly better supply-chain and environmental policies in place than its primary competitors, whilst Etsy and eBay facilitate the sale of handmade and secondhand items on a global scale.

How ethical are Ethical Superstore, Natural Collection and Spirit of Nature?

Three brands, Ethical Superstore, Natural Collection, and Spirit of Nature, all score reasonably well in this guide but don't quite make it to being recommended. Why is that? These brands are owned by Spark Etail, and Whistl is the ultimate owner of Spark Etail.

Spark Etail also manages the elements of the Amnesty Shop that aren’t actually Amnesty branded.

Whistl itself is primarily a logistics company, and it doesn’t work exclusively with ethical alternatives. For example, the company collaborated with fast-fashion monster Shein on a door-drop promotional campaign in 2020.

But Whistl's ethical retail wing has good policies in place, and the slightly lower marks for these brands are largely due to the wider company group. All these brands are much better alternatives to Amazon.

What do retailers mean by ethical?

Most of the brands' websites in this guide are laden with references to ethics, values, and purpose. Many products are labelled with ethical criteria, and shoppers can often use these criteria as a search filter.

We recommend choosing criteria with clear definitions and external verification, such as organic or Fairtrade.

Apply a healthy scepticism to less clear criteria, like ‘sustainable’, ‘eco-conscious’ or ‘economic empowerment’.

If a website isn’t explaining precisely what these terms mean, they could mean very little at all. Ethical Superstore has a wide range of search criteria, ranging from the vague e.g. ‘sustainable’, to the precise: ‘Fairtrade certified’, ‘GOTS’ (organic certification for cotton) and ‘recycled’.

Many retailers only require that their products comply with one ethical criterion. Whilst we understand that perceptions of ethics are partially subjective, it feels like a reach to give consumers a choice between different values – some flimsy, some concrete – and presenting any purchase option as an ‘ethical’ decision.

Company-wide ethical policies preferred

We’d prefer to see companies commit to concrete, company-wide policies and do the hard work of enforcing them throughout their entire supply chains. There should be a high bar for companies that call themselves ethical.

Allowing weak criteria on the basis of ‘providing consumer choice’ feels less like an ethical choice, and more like a marketing strategy.

Many brands in this guide do have a baseline standard for all products that covers a range of environmental issues as well as workers’ rights. Shared Earth and Veo’s sustainability criteria are detailed and available on their websites and are applied to every product that they retail. Other positive approaches include Big Green Smile – which stands out for its strict animal-testing policy and extensive list of banned toxics and pollutants – and Viva!, which is vegan only.

If you agree that company-wide policies are better, only select products that meet the highest standards, and let your favourite retailers know why you’re doing this.

Extra points for ethos

Ethical Consumer is proud to be a cooperative, and we firmly believe that a move away from shareholder capitalism is needed if humanity is to weather our ongoing environmental and social storms. We gave company ethos marks to John Lewis and Richer Sounds for being employee owned, and to Oxfam, Amnesty, and Viva! for being registered charities.

As an employee-owned business, John Lewis does not currently have outside investors. However, there have been reports that is considering selling a minority stake to external shareholders, having faced a loss of £230m in 2022 amid staff cuts and scrapped bonuses.

Finding alternatives to Amazon

This guide is part of our alternatives to Amazon series, to help you find more ethical online retailers than Amazon. With the potential lost tax revenue from Amazon's tax avoidance around half a billion pounds just for 2021 in the UK, it’s more important than ever that we resist the temptations of Amazon.

How do other online retailers compare to Amazon?

Amazon loses marks in every category that we cover but has received particular attention for its approaches to tax, workers’ rights, and the environment.

We’ve looked at how the other companies in this guide fare on these issues. Unsurprisingly, in most cases, the answer is better. There are only 2 marks between the top 14 companies in this guide. Even the bigger companies of eBay, Etsy and John Lewis fare better than Amazon.

Amazon Boycott campaign

For almost a decade Ethical Consumer has being calling for a boycott of Amazon over its tax avoidance which costs the UK millions in public funds every year, but it is also widely criticised for workers’ rights issues and its monopoly over many markets.

We have seen resistance to Amazon grow over time. Not only have we been joined by Fair Tax Mark, Tax Justice Network and others in condemning the company’s tax record, we’ve seen workers, unions, anti-racism organisations, anti-gentrification movements and others raise voices against Amazon globally.

By boycotting the company, we are taking part in this global movement and building the pressure for Amazon – or the legislation that allows its abuses – to change.

As this guide shows, there are alternatives out there, which, as well as simply not being Amazon, also deliberately offer a more ethical selection of products, or even fund campaigning through their sales.

We’ve tried to make sure that the ethical retailers included in this guide cover most of what you might use Amazon for, so you have options for where to spend your money.

Online retailers and the climate

Amazon likes to present itself as a climate crusader and touts its massive investments in renewable energy and electric delivery vehicles as evidence of its righteousness. However, take a look at what the company leaves unsaid (and unreported), and a rather different picture begins to form.

According to the ‘Amazon Employees for Climate Justice’ group, the company is failing its own 2019 pledge to be net-zero by 2040. Its emissions have instead increased by almost 40% since then, according to its most recent sustainability report.

The company claims that this is simply because it doubled the size of the fulfilment network throughout 2021 to accommodate increased demand, and that it has become more carbon efficient overall. Unfortunately, when growth outstrips efficiency, climate targets become impossible to reach.

Just three companies received our best rating for carbon reporting: Etsy, Green Stationery, and Shared Earth. But Back Market, Big Green Smile, Ethical Shop, Green Stationery, Shared Earth, Veo, and Viva! were all deemed to be providing genuine environmental alternatives and received our best rating for environmental reporting.

Every option is this guide is better than Amazon on packaging. The company has been making progress – it's reduced the average weight of its packaging by 41% since 2015 – but it continues to use large amounts of non-recyclable plastic.

What are ethical online retailers doing about tax and supply chain issues?

Tax avoidance

Tax avoidance in e-commerce is not exclusively an Amazon problem. According to a study from UNI Global Union, e-commerce companies are likely to pay three times less corporate income tax than large bricks-and-mortar retail chains. The two large e-commerce companies in this guide, eBay and Etsy, also received our worst rating for the likely use of tax avoidance strategies.

According to the Guardian, Etsy paid just £128,000 in UK corporation tax in 2020 despite £160m in sales, having funnelled most of those sales through Irish subsidiaries. TaxWatch’s George Turner commented: “Despite Etsy’s ethical pretensions, it is in fact just another US tech company using the same tax structures as other US tech companies to move profit out of the UK and into tax haven Ireland.”

On the other end of the spectrum, Richer Sounds’ long-standing accreditation by the Fair Tax Mark demonstrates the company’s transparent approach to tax, as well as its commitment to shunning tax-avoidance schemes.

Workers’ rights in the supply chain

Most small companies in this guide are exclusively retailers, and don’t manufacture or license any own-brand products. Their supply-chain policies are, as such, more focused on ensuring good purchasing practices, such as prioritising fair trade or organic products.

The Ethical Shop lists and provides information about every supplier that it uses on its website. The Big Green Smile, Ethical Shop, Shared Earth and Veo all had detailed supply chain policies considering their size.

Of the larger companies, only Oxfam, Richer Sounds, and John Lewis received our best rating in the category, whilst eBay and Etsy both scored a worst. The latter two present themselves as mere marketplaces, so take limited responsibility for the ethics of items that are sold on their platforms. For example, Etsy’s ‘ethical expectations’ document states that it can’t “guarantee the conditions under which products listed for sale on Etsy were made”.

Amazon’s groceries department was surveyed for the first time this year by the Groceries Code Adjudicator, which collects accusations of supplier code of conduct violations. Almost 12% of surveyed suppliers said Amazon “never” complied with the code, whilst a further 30% said it rarely did. The company was the worst performing grocer in the survey – with nearly four times as many alleged violations as the next on the list, Lidl.

Conversely, the John Lewis-owned Waitrose was second from the top with 98% of suppliers stating that it ‘consistently’ or ‘mostly’ adhered to the code of conduct.

Is shopping online better for the planet?

Conventional wisdom has often dictated that shopping online has a lower environmental impact than its high street counterpart. A 2013 MIT study found bricks-and-mortar shopping to have double the carbon footprint of its online shopping. The primary logic is such: transporting customers to physical shops in cars is resource intensive, whilst delivery systems are optimised for efficiency. This picture looks more complex a decade later.

Delivery systems now feel optimised less for efficiency and more for the ever-increasing expectations of customers who want same-day shipping that’s free at the point of purchase, alongside essentially infinite returns. When dealing with a one-day shipping window, companies often send out half-filled trucks, generating more traffic and thus emissions. One-in-three items bought online are returned, compared to a 9% return rate at physical shops.

Interestingly, all the carbon-comparison studies we found were from the US, where non-online shopping often revolves around car-centric, suburban shopping malls. Driving to an out-of-town mega mall has a very different impact to, say, cycling down your local town’s high street. Thriving high streets have value beyond merely facilitating consumerism – should we not focus on decarbonising our access to these spaces before resigning ourselves to a future of clicking alone in our homes?

When shopping online, you can help reduce some carbon impact by bulk buying and buying more of what you need from one seller so that it can all be sent together. But beware of marketplaces where everything goes into the same online basket but gets sent separately. You’ll also generate fewer van journeys if you choose to collect your items from a walkable pickup point, but if that’s not feasible, make sure you’re at home for your deliveries. Failed deliveries mean more emissions.

Buying secondhand and refurbished items

Even the most ethically sourced item has some environmental and societal cost when manufactured and distributed brand new. Buying secondhand is a great way to reduce consumerism’s waste impacts and pushes back against the constant societal demand for the newest upgrade. Oxfam offers a wide range of secondhand goods but doesn’t cater so well for specialised sectors beyond clothes and books.

For consumer electronics, Back Market is a good option. The company provides a marketplace for professionally refurbished phones, laptops, games consoles and more, and guarantees that each item is restored to “perfect working condition”. However, the company outsources its refurbishment, and items are sold by individual sellers. It is therefore worth checking reviews of each seller before you buy.

Life cycle assessments have shown that refurbished smartphones and tablets always avoid a significant amount of environmental damage when compared to brand new products, even accounting for resource-heavy replacement parts like batteries.

We have additional articles on buying secondhand and refurbished electronics, and repairing and buying secondhand clothes.

Key to guide in scoretable: S = Secondhand; R = Refurbished or recycled products