Some things about Cloverly have surprised our clients and potential clients. So we thought we'd address a few questions that have arisen.
Q. You really will charge us no implementation fee, no setup fee, no monthly fee? We don't have to sign a contract?A. That's right. If you sign up with Cloverly now, we'll charge only per transaction, with no additional fees or contracts—ever. With our usual payment model, the owner of an ecommerce store pays nothing; the store's customers have the option of paying a little more at checkout to green their transactions. (For an explanation, click here.) You, the store owner, control whether you use our Sustainability as a Service platform; you can turn our API on or off as you wish. There's nothing tricky or mysterious about it. We're a startup; we're simply offering good deals to introduce ourselves to the marketplace. As we grow, we anticipate adding a setup or monthly fee for new clients only. Our current partners will be grandfathered in and will never pay any such fees.
Q. Does having the Cloverly option show up at checkout discourage some customers from completing their purchases? We don't want to hurt our conversion rates.A. Cloverly's founders include ecommerce veterans, and we're really sensitive about making the Cloverly procedure as frictionless as possible. At checkout, ecommerce customers see one short sentence giving them an option to pay a specific extra amount—usually less than a dollar. They can click a checkbox, or not, and then complete their order. That's it. There is an optional link they can click for details about the offsetting, but they're free to ignore it. So far, our clients have not reported any negative effect on conversion or bounce rates.
Q. What kind of data do you collect from each transaction?A. Only what we need to calculate the carbon impact of the transaction, which is usually the package weight and the origin and destination zip codes, if they're available. If not, we estimate conservatively. We store only zip codes, no customer data.
Q. Can we test Cloverly before we take it live on our website?A. Absolutely. In fact, we strongly recommend that you do. Typical steps for an installation would be integration, rigorous testing until you're happy with how everything works (with us available to help resolve any issues), and then a soft launch.
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