If you built an environmental impact feature on Cloverly’s API, you may have noticed something: Cloverly is no longer primarily an e-commerce carbon offset API.
Over the past two years, Cloverly made a significant strategic shift. Their focus moved from buyer-side e-commerce integrations (helping merchants offset shipping emissions at checkout) toward Catalyst, a commercial platform for carbon credit project developers and suppliers. That’s a different market, a different customer, and a different product roadmap.
If you’re a developer building sustainability features into a Shopify store, WooCommerce site, or SaaS product, Cloverly’s current direction may not align with what you actually need.
This guide is for developers who have an existing Cloverly integration, or who evaluated Cloverly and are now looking at what comes next. We’ll cover what changed, why tree planting APIs have become the dominant choice for e-commerce environmental integrations, and exactly how to migrate to GoodAPI.
What Changed With Cloverly
Cloverly launched in 2019 with a clear focus: the world’s first API for carbon credits, targeted at e-commerce. Merchants could make a single API call to offset the carbon footprint of an order at checkout, drawing from a marketplace of verified carbon credit projects.
That model made sense when voluntary carbon markets were relatively straightforward. But the carbon market has grown more complex, and Cloverly’s newer focus reflects that shift. Catalyst is an end-to-end software platform for carbon credit project developers to manage inventory, pricing, distribution, and sales pipelines. It’s built for organizations selling carbon credits, not for e-commerce developers buying small fractional offsets per transaction.
The practical result for developers: the tool you originally chose for its e-commerce-first positioning is now primarily a supplier-side platform. The API still exists, but it’s no longer where the company is investing.
Why Tree Planting Outperforms Carbon Offsets for E-Commerce
Before migrating, it’s worth understanding why tree planting APIs have taken over the e-commerce sustainability space.
Carbon offsets are genuinely hard to communicate. When a customer sees “we’ve offset the carbon footprint of your order,” they have no clear mental model for what actually happened. Carbon credit quality also varies widely by project, vintage, and methodology, and the scrutiny around offset claims intensified significantly following investigations into popular project types in 2022 and 2023.
Tree planting is legible. A customer can understand “we planted a tree in Kenya for your order.” They can share it. With GoodAPI’s Veritree integration, every tree is GPS-tracked and supported through its critical first years of growth, with photos and verification evidence accessible via API.
There’s also a developer experience difference. GoodAPI’s API is purpose-built for event-driven e-commerce triggers: plant N trees per order, tag by customer or product, query by date range, retrieve aggregated impact data. It’s a lean RESTful API without the complexity of credit portfolios, retirement records, or vintage management that carbon credit APIs carry.
GoodAPI charges $0.43/tree with no monthly fee, billed at the end of each month. No minimums, no pricing tiers, no enterprise negotiations before you can get started.
Migrating to GoodAPI: Step by Step
Here’s how to replace a Cloverly-style integration with GoodAPI. Most teams have a working migration in under an hour.
Create an Account and Grab Your Keys
Sign up at app.thegoodapi.com/fe/login. Signup is self-serve: no invite, no sales call needed. You’ll get two keys immediately:
- Production key (
api_key_prod): real impact, real billing. - Test key (
api_key_test): behaves identically, but doesn’t trigger charges or actual planting.
Use your key in the Authorization header on every request. That’s all the auth setup there is.
Replace Your Carbon Offset POST Call
Your Cloverly integration likely made a POST request to retire a carbon credit after a transaction. Replace it with GoodAPI’s plant endpoint:
curl -X POST https://app.thegoodapi.com/plant/trees \ -H "Authorization: your_api_key_prod" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "count": 1, "attribution": "order_12345", "metadata": { "customer_id": "cust_abc", "product_id": "prod_xyz" } }'The response returns the details of the planting event plus your cumulative total, which you can use to drive a live impact counter.
Add Idempotency Keys for Production Safety
If your webhook or background job can retry on failure, pass an idempotency_key to make sure you never plant the same order twice:
{ "count": 1, "attribution": "order_12345", "idempotency_key": "order_12345"}Use the order ID as the idempotency key. GoodAPI will recognize duplicate requests and return the original result without creating a second planting event. This is the single most important thing to get right in a production integration.
Query Impact Data for Reporting
GoodAPI’s GET endpoint lets you filter plantings by order, customer, date range, or arbitrary metadata. This is how you power per-customer impact dashboards, per-product reporting, and your annual sustainability summary:
# Trees planted for a specific ordercurl "https://app.thegoodapi.com/plant/trees?attribution_key=order_12345" \ -H "Authorization: your_api_key_prod"
# All trees planted in Q1 2026curl "https://app.thegoodapi.com/plant/trees?created_at=2026-01-01&end_at=2026-03-31" \ -H "Authorization: your_api_key_prod"Surface Verification Evidence in Your UI
The /evidence endpoint returns aggregated planting evidence from Veritree: photos, videos, GPS coordinates, carbon offset tonnage, and restored area grouped by region. Use this for a live impact page or customer-facing sustainability dashboard:
curl https://app.thegoodapi.com/evidence \ -H "Authorization: your_api_key_prod"The response includes project totals across countries like Kenya, Madagascar, Brazil, Indonesia, and Haiti, plus region-level media URLs served from Veritree’s CDN. Responses are cached for 30 days, so this is safe to call on page load.
How GoodAPI and Cloverly Compare
| GoodAPI | Cloverly | |
|---|---|---|
| Per-unit cost | $0.43/tree (fixed) | Variable (credit price) |
| Monthly fee | None | Varies by plan |
| Verification | Veritree GPS-tracked | Gold Standard / VCS |
| Customer-facing story | Tree planted in [country] | Carbon offset retired |
| E-commerce focus | Primary use case | Declining (Catalyst pivot) |
| Shopify native app | Yes, 5.0★, 200+ reviews | No |
| API complexity | Single POST endpoint | Credit portfolio management |
| Self-serve signup | Yes, instant keys | Demo required |
A Note on What You Tell Customers
Switching from carbon offsets to tree planting also changes your messaging in a useful way. Instead of “we’ve offset the carbon footprint of your order” (which immediately invites the follow-up “with what credits and verified how?”), you can tell customers: “We planted a real tree in Kenya for your order, tracked by Veritree.”
That’s a claim customers can understand, share on social media, and hold you accountable for. It’s harder to greenwash: a tree either got planted or it didn’t.
Getting Started
If you’re ready to migrate, the process is faster than it looks. Grab your test key at app.thegoodapi.com/fe/login, make a test planting call, and verify the response. Most developers have a working integration within the hour.
For Shopify merchants who don’t want to write any code at all, install the GoodAPI app from the Shopify App Store. The app handles webhook setup, order triggers, and a customer-facing impact counter automatically.
For questions about high-volume integrations, custom configurations, or migrating a complex multi-product setup, reach out to the GoodAPI team at hello@thegoodapi.com.