Online shopping is becoming easier and easier, with more selection and speedier deliveries. And purchasing everyday items, such as toothpaste and tampons or washing detergent and sponges, is increasingly shifting toward online rather than in-store.

In Canada, 84 per cent of internet users shopped online in 2018, according to Statistics Canada . In the U.S., the share of these fast-moving consumer goods low-priced items that you buy frequently being bought online is set to go up from 1.5 per cent in 2017 to 8 per cent by 2025. In the U.K, its expected to increase from 7.5 to 12 per cent. How you choose to make these small purchases could have a big effect on your carbon footprint .

Whats the best way to minimize the impact ? According to new research, the answer lies somewhere between e-commerce and a good old-fashioned trip to the store.

The study , conducted in the U.K. and published on Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, examined the carbon footprint of three ways of shopping: physically going to the store yourself, shopping online the offerings of a traditional store and having your purchases delivered (what it calls bricks and clicks), or using online-only retailers like Amazon, which deliver goods from a warehouse.

Researchers considered a number of factors, from the weight of various personal and home care items to the energy usage of shops and warehouses. They found that choosing to shop via bricks and clicks rather than driving to the store is most likely to decrease the greenhouse gas emissions of your shopping.

Where cars are highly used for the purpose of shopping, like in the U.S. and in the U.K., the bricks-and-clicks method often is a greener choice, said one of the lead authors, Sadegh Shahmohammadi, from the environmental science department at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Having the goods delivered in a van that is also delivering other peoples orders adds up to fewer miles travelled than if each customer had driven to the store and back, Shahmohammadi said.

In the U.S., 95 per cent of shopping trips are made by car. In China or the Netherlands, where the majority of shopping trips are by foot or bike, using the bricks-and-clicks method doesnt reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared to going to physical stores and may even be more carbon-intensive.