Sustainability and Circular Economy in E-Commerce Platforms: Determinants and Outcomes of Sustainable Practices
Year: 2026
Type: dataset
Abstract: E-commerce platforms increasingly adopt sustainability and circular-economy practices, yet evidence on the organizational drivers of such adoption and the mechanisms linking practices to platform outcomes remains limited. Drawing on stakeholder theory, institutional theory, and the natural-resource-based view, this study examines whether regulatory pressures, consumer expectations, and perceived competitive benefit are associated with reported sustainable-practice adoption, and whether adoption is associated with perceived consumer loyalty, platform reputation, and relative financial performance through manager-perceived consumer value, with platform governance and market context as boundary conditions. Survey data from 400 platform organizations across six regions were analyzed using heteroskedasticity-robust regressions, bias-corrected bootstrap mediation (5,000 resamples), and moderated regression, with covariance-based SEM as a robustness check. All three determinants are positively associated with adoption (R² = .223), consumer expectations most strongly. Adoption is positively associated with reputation (β = .526), loyalty (β = .467), and perceived financial performance (β = .272); manager-perceived consumer value carries 16%–32% of the total associations. Adoption–outcome slopes are steeper under decentralized governance for loyalty and reputation, while the financial-performance interaction is imprecisely estimated and market-context interactions are not detectable. Given the cross-sectional, single-informant design, all results are associational. The findings support a value-creation logic for sustainable digital commerce and identify governance architecture as a testable boundary condition.
Author: Abdou, Shereen Aly Hussien Aly
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204478702