Warehouses - To Wardrobes in a Stitch | Madhumitha Gupta

Madhumitha Gupta

Design Lead and Director of UX at Myntra

An evangelist, speaker and mentor with 20 years of experience in User Experience Design leading and inspiring multinational designers, Madhumita Gupta is a passionate design leader with a flair for product conceptualisation and building strategic roadmaps. She believes that ethics can make or break a business.

Background

The Fashion eCommerce market is estimated to grow to $1 Trillion by 2025 and grow 141 times in India between 2020 to 2025. During the early stages of shopping in the eCommerce journey, ethics are not a primary concern for users, finding the best deals, styles and earliest deliveries are, however, as purchase intent grows, transparency, ethical sourcing, and quality become critical in decision making. In the report entitled ‘The Future Shopper 2019’ 55% of respondents from the Gen Z cohort stated that brands’ ethical and moral values influence their purchasing decisions.

Definition of Ethics

Chris MacDonald defines ethics as “critical and structured philosophies that study people’s behaviours.” According to MacDonald, ethics is structured because it is a system of unifying diverse opinions into a set of ethical common rules.

“For practical purposes, ethics means providing reasoned justification for our choices and behaviour when it affects others and reasoned justification for our praise or criticism of other people’s behaviour”. (MacDonald 2010)

David Parsons (Head of UX, Xerox) defines ethics as a set of rules of conduct expected to be followed for cultural and legal reasons. In the business context, it translates into principles that guide a organizations way of doing business. Ethics set standard rules for people to follow in tradeoff situations.

In the report entitled ‘The Future Shopper 2019’ 55% of respondents of the Gen Z cohort stated that brands’ ethical and moral values influence their purchasing decisions.

Why do companies need to be ethical?

Ethical business not only helps the company but also its stakeholders i.e employees,customers, suppliers, and investors. For employees, good ethics builds loyalty and motivation. For customers, it builds trust and engagement. It holds suppliers accountable and reliable. Finally, for investors, a good reputation leads to better returns on investment.

What are the ethical issues fashion eCommerce businesses deal with?

Ethical issues faced by eCommerce businesses can be classified into 5 areas, namelycustomer privacy, security, customer benefit, environmental sensitivity, intellectual property and workplace conditions. For a brand with warehouses that are internal and supplier managed, companies need to build strong policies in each of these 5 areas to resolve ethical dilemmas.

How do companies manage ethical issues like privacy, security, and integrity in the best way possible?

At the core of ethics lies the trust model, as suggested in the book “Trust in the Network Economy”. Organizations invest heavily to protect customer data by providing state of the art security. Compliance and data security policies protect data ensuring customer privacy is never compromised.

Whatever the size or niche of a company, people are no longer satisfied with just a great deal or an innovative product or service. They want to know a company is involved with something ethical or helping someone for good when they buy from a company.

Merchant legitimacy and fulfilment need to be assured through branding and consistency. The focus should be on keeping app content as close to reality as possible. A strict vendor onboarding process and elaborate catalogue quality checks ensure that the product description is never inflated, prices and offers do not violate trade laws and the product meets the promise of quality and authenticity. Designing tools for partners which set clear expectations can help in achieving these goals. In case of conflict between business and customer goals, decision matrices help in cost-benefit analysis.

App design and content set the right tone ensuring users that they are in control of their information and the ability to share feedback seals trust.

To be environmentally sensitive, brands should move to plastic-free packaging. Copyrighting features and functionalities as intellectual property needs consistent effort and management as copying is simple with the advent of the internet.

Are ethics important in e-Commerce? The answer is yes. A customer-first approach plays a vital role in tradeoff discussions during cost versus value mapping.

What is Out of Scope of Ethics?

Often in discussions on ethics, various topics arise like Workplace engagement e.g cross-functional collaboration, Inclusiveness in product lines e.g support for plus size and Petites, Diversity in the workforce e.g having models from different skin tones in catalogue pictures, Employee equality e.g pay parity across gender, Corporate social responsibilities.

Although these are sensitive topics, I believe that they have more to do with culture than ethics. Today, companies are not only expected to cater to ethical concerns but also instill a culture for the greater good of society and the environment.

Conclusion

Are ethics important in e-Commerce? The answer is yes. A customer-first approach plays a vital role in tradeoff discussions during cost versus value mapping. It is hard to often quantify customer satisfaction, trust and delight in revenue numbers. This is where the company values help in driving decisions. Whatever the size or niche of a company, people are no longer satisfied with just a great deal or an innovative product or service. They want to know if a company is involved with something ethical or helping someone for good when they buy from a company.