Buyer User Guide: How do I search for sustainable products?

Introduction to Sustainability Data

Purchasing (formerly known as Advanced Marketplace) suppliers can provide sustainability information for their organisation and products if they have it. Buyer organisations (your procurement team) then have the ability to configure how this data is brought together to be visible to their end users specifically.

This guide provides direction on how to search the system specifically for 'Sustainable' items whether by the search results page or via Browse by Suppliers. If you would like more information about how to search generally on the system, please go to our guide here: Searching on the Marketplace

Locating sustainable items in your search results

Sustainability flag

The search results show whether an item has any associated sustainability data by displaying a green 'Sustainable Item' leaf flag. To see further information, click on the item to view the product details page:

The product information page includes a tab to display the sustainability data associated with the item. At this level, the display is the high level sustainability grouping(s) that an item falls into which will have been created by your organisation's procurement team:

To view the specific item attribute originally provided by the supplier to see why it falls into a specific group click the Learn More option.

For example, this product has the following recycling credentials:

Filtering Search Results by sustainability attributes

From the search results page you can also filter the results by sustainability attributes using the left hand side panel to help narrow your results.

The filter works in the same way as other filters in that it shows how many items in the search results meet each sustainability option. Choosing an option will filter the search results to only show those that meet the chosen criteria:

Filtering search results by 'sustainable' suppliers

You can also filter your search results page by supplier, but with the additional ability of shortening the list of suppliers available to pick from by choosing to apply a specific sustainability filter option first.

Click the dropdown for Filter suppliers by Supplier Sustainability, e.g. Local Suppliers, and select an option:

Then click the relevant supplier you wish to filter the results by in the second box based on the results:

Comparing sustainable products

Comparing sustainable products can be done in the same way as normal, but for any items with sustainable data available (based on what your Procurement Team has reviewed) the comparison contains a row that shows the sustainability data across the items being compared. The sustainability groupings are in bold with the specific attributes which the item is associated with, listed below each group:

Filtering 'Browse by Suppliers' using sustainability data

The Browse by Supplier search option has the capability to browse supplier organisations using sustainability credentials. If these have been configured, you will see an additional option on the browse by supplier screen:

Please note that these are attributes that are relevant to an entire organisation, not to individual products.

Click on the Supplier Sustainability dropdown to display a list of supplier attribute groups that suppliers may belong to:

Selecting one of the options will then filter the list of suppliers in the dropdown underneath to show only those that have been marked against that option:

Supplier Information Screen

Once a supplier has been chosen from the Browse by Suppliers screen (whether just choosing generally or by the above process), a Sustainability tab will show as part of their Profile information which summarises any mappings your organisation has made for them:

Click Learn More against any of the mappings to display the details of the specific supplier attributes:

How did we do?

Buyer User Guide: How do I 'favourite' a product?

Buyer User Guide: How do I create and use Saved Baskets?

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