Razer's Game-Changing Traceable Carbon Neutral Shopping Cart

Razer Fintech, the financial technology arm of Razer, developed Restorify after listening to its customers’ climate concerns and criticisms around carbon-offsetting programs.

While carbon-neutral checkout solutions are not new, carbon offsets can be hard to trace and monitor.

Some businesses do not have the ability to make up-to-date carbon-footprint calculations across entire product lifecycles. Consumers also do not have visibility over how much carbon they have helped to offset or how offsets are calculated in the first place. This means that businesses and consumers do not always know if their contributions are making real, positive impact on sustainability projects.

This lack of transparency also stems from carbon credits typically being denominated in metric tons, each of which is not readily divisible. Restorify aims to promote more transparency and accountability in the carbon market by fractionalizing carbon credits and only allowing consumers to use traceable offsets with realized decarbonization effects. This allows customers to track their contributions towards carbon-offsetting efforts and businesses to offset their emissions via a mass-product emissions calculator.

Razer worked with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build and deploy Restorify in the cloud. AWS Fargate serves as Restorify's serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine. Amazon API Gateway helps to create, maintain, and secure the solution's application programming interface (APIs) at scale, while Amazon EventBridge assists with building event-driven infrastructures for faster feature deployment. These services let Restorify deliver near real-time data to targets quickly, securely, and at scale.

Restorify improves accountability by issuing a carbon-offset certificate with each purchase. The certificate details the total amount of carbon emissions offset by the customer's purchase—and what kind of project the credits supported, and in which country. It also includes the certification standard. All carbon-offset projects are also audited and traceable to recognized registries such as Verra and Gold Standard.

In addition, Restorify offers a carbon footprint calculator that’s integrated into all aspects of its online marketplace. At checkout, it provides consumers with immediate, up-to-date carbon-offset estimates based on their purchases.

Another reason Razer chose to build on AWS is because the sustainability visions of both companies aligned. As part of The Climate Pledge, co-founded by Amazon, AWS has pledged to power all its geographic Regions, globally, with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025 and reach net zero by 2040.

Conor McNamara, managing director for ASEAN at AWS, says, “AWS is committed to being the world’s most sustainable cloud. This charter, combined with the differentiating breadth and depth of AWS data services, makes AWS an ideal partner for Razer as they embark on this exciting new chapter.”

Looking ahead, Razer plans to open Restorify to other businesses, allowing easy integration with other existing ecommerce platforms, to provide carbon-offset tracing. This allows businesses that do not otherwise have such capabilities to calculate the carbon footprint of their products and services.

Razer is currently supporting the net-zero transition for over 50,000 merchants under Razer Fintech’s network at no additional cost. AWS will also help market Restorify to over 100,000 AWS Partners from across 150 countries via AWS Marketplace.

“Carbon offsetting has the potential to be one of the most effective interventions used to lower carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Restorify empowers both consumers and businesses to take climate action more proactively,” says Min-Liang Tan, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Razer.

“Our life-cycle approach allows us to develop interventions that drive emission reductions, but carbon credits will still have a role to play in the transition to becoming net zero. He continues, “In our own journey to net zero, we have realized that there are growing pains and that not all carbon credits are equal. With Restorify, we hope our novel approach towards carbon credits will foster greater accountability and transparency within carbon offsetting.”