This quarter, Wayfair Inc. added new filter options to its ecommerce site that allow shoppers to find goods with  sustainability certifications, such as Green Squared and LEED v4.

The home furnishings giant allows shoppers to filter for 50 sustainable features certified by a third-party organization. Shoppers can sort using attributes such as water-efficient, nontoxic, cruelty-free or fair trade.

When shoppers search for a certain product, more than a dozen filters appear on the left-hand side of the ecommerce site, such as price per item and material product style. The “Shop Sustainably” filter and the attributes relevant to that product category are now visible in this section.

The “Shop Sustainably” filter and the attributes relevant to that product category are now visible on Wayfair.com’s site filtering section.

Wayfair works with its suppliers for them to note when products have the certification so it can add that tag on its backend. The retailer ranks No. 7 in the 2022 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000.

Wayfair added this feature after its search engine optimization and marketing teams noticed certain keywords driving traffic to its site, says Derek Oliver, global head of corporate responsibility. Plus, once on the site, shoppers would type in various sustainable keywords into its search bar.

“When you work in retail, every employee is also a customer, and you start to hear from our own employees and what they are searching for,” Oliver says.

If Wayfair wants to provide its shoppers with the most value and best customer experience, it needs to provide them with the right tools, Oliver says.

Wayfair says it has 12,000 products with at least one certified sustainability aspect to it, and it hopes to grow this number, Oliver says. This is a small subset of Wayfair.com’s SKU count. The giant has not recently published its number of products, but has previously stated that it has more than 14 million SKUs. This would mean less than 1% of its products have a sustainability component.

Wayfair added an early version of this feature in 2020, and after a while, it pivoted and revamped its offering to the one it launched in October 2022.

“We got clearer, more transparent and better about the filter options and what those were called.” Oliver says. “We thought customers were searching Green Guard, but they weren’t, they were looking for nontoxic.”

Wayfair will evaluate the success of the filters like it would “any other attribute,” such as evaluating how shoppers responded to it and if it changes the sales funnel in any way, Oliver says without sharing the specific metrics Wayfair will be looking at.

Oliver did not provide any data about the number of shoppers using these filtering options.

This type of filtering option is important to nearly a quarter of shoppers, according to an October 2022 survey of 1,107 online shoppers by Digital Commerce 360 and Bizrate Insights. In the survey, 23% of consumers say robust search option specific to the product they are looking for, such as organic cotton, are important to delivering a functional and well-design shopping experience.

Sign up

Stay on top of the latest developments in the ecommerce industry. Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 Retail News.

Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Be the first to know when Digital Commerce 360 publishes news content.