Sustainability: A Major Growth Driver for Digital Retail

As retailers plan for the remainder of 2025, sustainability is proving to be a major driver of growth. In 2024, eco-conscious shopping habits and the rise of the circular economy transformed digital commerce, with fashion resale platforms like Depop leading the charge.

Depop was one of the companies recognized in the recent Similarweb Digital 100 ranking of the fastest growing websites and apps, with 45 percent growth in monthly active users for its app. Depop's performance highlights a broader consumer shift: younger shoppers are prioritizing secondhand fashion over fast fashion, seeking affordability, uniqueness, and environmental impact reduction.

The rise of the “circular economy” — where products are reused, resold or repurposed — stood out across multiple categories. The appeal to consumers is not entirely altruistic, as these companies often offer consumers ways of saving money. These brands let consumers feel good about saving money and saving the planet at the same time.

Other companies with outstanding 2023 to 2024 digital growth in the U.S. included beauty brand Lush (web visitors up 138 percent), food waste reduction service Too Good to Go (app users up 97 percent), eco-friendly home goods maker Water Drop Filter (visitors up 75 percent), and refurbished electronics seller Back Market (app users up 42 percent), all of which emphasize ethical and environmentally-conscious choices.

By mixing metrics in this summary, we don’t mean to ignore that web traffic may be more important to one company, while app usage might be more important to another. However, Depop is an example of a company that is excelling across both. Depop ranked in our awards program for its app, which is an important part of how it creates a connection with consumers, but its web visitor growth was also very strong, about 66 percent YoY.

While sustainability wasn’t part of the story for every high-growth digital player, this trend may represent an opportunity to get ahead with an important group of consumers even in tough markets. Fashion is a good example.

When we looked at user growth for the e-commerce websites of fashion brands that had incorporated sustainability into their products and marketing, we found that they grew their audiences by 8 percent vs. a 6.7 percent drop for the total category. The difference was even more pronounced as measured by traffic (including multiple visits by the same individual), which was up 27.8 percent for the sustainable players, while the trend for the fashion industry as a whole was negative, a 6.4 percent drop on average.

Zooming out for a broader look at the digital economy, we looked at products sold on Amazon.com that promoted themselves as sustainable, compared to all products across all categories. While both saw positive growth in estimated unit sales, sustainable products were up 53.8 percent in 2024, outpacing the overall average growth of 10.5 percent.

These findings challenge the notion that in 2025, consumers are solely focused on saving money at the expense of all other values. While economic concerns and financial stress are certainly present, a significant portion of consumers still care about the character of the brands they do business with.

Appealing to these eco-sensitive consumers could be the difference between strong growth and no growth (or negative growth) for digital retailers and consumer products companies.

Laurie Naspe is director, market insights, Similarweb, a provider of AI-powered digital data intelligence solutions.