However, the brilliance of the online shopping is not the ability to deliver anything within a couple of days or even to provide competitive prices. The real success is that online stores have found how to cater to niche desires in a highly segmented market. This has allowed for companies like vine.com and other online stores to specifically serve the earth-vegan-crunchy granola shopper (like me) by providing options that are labeled vegan, GMO free, PETA certified, fair trade, or b corp certified.
The various certifications are aimed to help shoppers to buy their values. The labels allow customers to support companies that are committed to specific causes and provide them with some piece of mind that their choices are not only capital driven. However, these labels, like previous ones based on religious preferences of consumption, fail to address holistically various issues at the same time. They serve as a pinhole to light one specific issue about our consumption, it being animal well-fare, fair payment of trade (but not labor), or sustainable sourcing of raw materials.