How We Rigorously Test Our Products For Quality

I asked 232 eco-friendly shoppers what they think the hardest part about shopping sustainably is.

Here are the issues ranked from greatest to least:

1. Price
2. Availability
3. Effectiveness
4. Greenwashing

From my interviews, I found that many people stayed away from green products because they were less effective.

This was no surprise, many green products just aren’t that good. But I knew this wasn’t the case for all products, and I knew the bad products had been overshadowing the good ones.

This began our journey to create a collection of products that weren’t just selected randomly and thrown up in a store, but rigorously tested, vetted, and carefully selected from the hundreds of other options.

This meant launching a 21-day testing process for every single product that goes live on our site.

Now, you might be wondering...

“Aidan, incredible founder of Ecoternatives, What does this testing period look like?”

Well, I’m glad you asked, here is our 5-step process:

1. It first starts off with narrowing down the products we want to test in the first place. This takes about a month. I’m not going to explain all the intricacies here, but we have a strict criterion for affordability, geography, and social + environmental ethics. Here is a blog article I wrote about it.

2. This process leaves us with about 4-5 products we want to test. To save money, we’ll email these companies and ask for several free samples for our site. Which companies (generally) gladly do.

3. After we test the products ourselves, we select 10 repeat customers to send each of these 4-5 products to. As long as they are happy to receive the products, and then participate in a 25-minute call thereafter.

4. I won’t lie, we also give them out to our eco-conscious friends like they're candy, and it's halloween.

5. And lastly, we sift through each of the product reviews already on retailers' stores, and we email the brand to ask further questions if necessary.

To be a product tester you must:

• Already be using a similar product.
• Have ample time to give each product a fair shot.
• Not already have strong preconceived beliefs about any of our suppliers, or know the prices of the products (to create unbiased results).

Email us if you’d like to be a part of this :)

No way we stop there though, here are two more things we do:

1. Pull products off the shelf and retest the product if we receive negative feedback + bad reviews about the product in our store. We generally work with these customers to find a better product to test.
2. Offer a 30-day happiness guarantee on all of our products. Without asking for a return. This means, that if you purchase from us, and for whatever reason you don’t like our products, we’ll give you a full refund faster than you can type “I’ll never buy from you again”

Conclusion

All in all, our goal at Ecoternatives is to make sustainable products more attractive for anyone to buy. This started with making our zero-waste store, the world's most affordable.

We’re obsessed with it, because we believe doing these things are the only way we can see sustainability becoming mainstream.

If you want to shop with us, do so here. If you want to be a product tester, reach out here!