Green Shopping Online Only Works When Consumers Know What They Are Buying, Study Finds

Clicking “like” on a green product post is easy. Buying the product is another matter entirely. A new study from Vietnam suggests that the gap between the two may be one of the most important, and most overlooked, puzzles in sustainable consumption, and that the missing ingredient is not better apps or flashier marketing but something far more basic: what consumers actually know.

The research, published in the open-access journal Heliyon by Kim Quoc Trung Nguyen of Ho Chi Minh City Open University, surveyed 375 Vietnamese online shoppers who had previously bought green or eco-friendly products over the internet. Using a statistical technique known as partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM, the study tested a single integrated model of how environmental stimuli on e-commerce platforms are converted into the intention to buy. The results, the author argues, overturn a comfortable assumption of digital marketing: that engagement with green content automatically breeds green purchasing.

The theoretical backbone of the study is the stimulus–organism–response framework, a classic model of environmental psychology that traces a causal chain from external cues to internal states to behavior. In this case, the stimuli are four features of the green e-commerce environment: green perceived value, meaning the environmental and personal benefits a consumer believes a product delivers; eco-brand credibility, the trustworthiness of a brand’s environmental claims; mobile shopping experience, the quality and usability of the shopping app itself; and platform sustainability features, such as eco-labels, green filters, and transparent environmental information. The “organism” in the middle of the chain is digital engagement behavior, the reading, commenting, sharing, and recommending of green content online. The “response” is online shopping intention.

What the model found was strikingly consistent. All four stimuli were positively and significantly associated with digital engagement, and all four were also directly associated with purchase intention. Green perceived value showed the strongest pull toward engagement, with a path coefficient of 0.334, followed closely by mobile shopping experience at 0.323 and eco-brand credibility at 0.322. Platform sustainability features, at 0.287, were also robust, and notably carried the largest direct effect on intention among the four, suggesting that visible cues like eco-labels and green filtering tools do more than invite interaction; they reduce the uncertainty that surrounds environmental claims, which consumers often cannot verify before a parcel arrives.

Digital engagement itself did predict purchase intention, but only weakly. Its direct path coefficient was a modest 0.163, with a small effect size of 0.052. In plain terms, people who read, discuss, and share green content online are somewhat more likely to intend to buy green products, but engagement alone explains little. The study interprets engagement instead as a transmission mechanism, a bridge that carries evaluations of value, trust, and experience toward intention, rather than an engine that drives purchasing by itself. The model explained 51 percent of the variance in digital engagement and a substantial 75.3 percent of the variance in online shopping intention, but the interaction terms, not the engagement pathway, accounted for much of that explanatory power.

Those interaction terms are the heart of the paper. The author tested two consumer competencies as moderators of the engagement-to-intention link: digital literacy, the ability to find, evaluate, and use online information, and environmental knowledge, the understanding of environmental facts and the ecological consequences of consumption. Both strengthened the relationship, but environmental knowledge did so more powerfully. The interaction between engagement and environmental knowledge produced an effect size of 0.810, classified as large, while the digital literacy interaction produced 0.623, also large but clearly smaller. The corresponding path coefficients were 0.453 and 0.377 respectively, both highly significant.

The simple-slope analysis makes the pattern vivid. When environmental knowledge was high, one standard deviation above the mean, the effect of engagement on intention was strongly positive, with a slope of 0.616. At average knowledge levels the slope was 0.163. But when knowledge was low, the slope turned significantly negative, at minus 0.290. The same reversal appeared for digital literacy, with slopes of 0.540, 0.163, and minus 0.214 at high, mean, and low levels. In other words, for consumers lacking these competencies, more engagement with green content was actually associated with less intention to buy, a result the author links to the elaboration likelihood model, in which the ability to process information centrally determines whether persuasion succeeds.

Why would knowledge matter more than digital skill? The author’s answer is that the two competencies operate at different levels of specificity. Digital literacy is instrumental and domain-general: it helps people navigate interfaces, assess reviews, and adapt to new apps. Environmental knowledge is value-laden and sustainability-specific: it enables consumers to judge whether a green claim is credible, to recognize greenwashing, and to align a purchase with their own environmental principles. A digitally fluent shopper can scroll effortlessly through eco-marketing without ever asking whether the claims are true. A knowledgeable shopper asks that question first, and the answer determines whether engagement ripens into a purchase.

The Vietnamese setting adds an important layer of interpretation. The country’s e-commerce market has grown among the fastest in Southeast Asia since the pandemic, with platforms such as Shopee, Lazada, Tiki, and TikTok Shop becoming mainstay shopping channels, particularly for young, mobile-first consumers. In such a market, stimulating engagement with green content is comparatively easy; the harder task is converting that engagement into sustainable purchasing, which depends on whether consumers can critically evaluate environmental information. The author cautions that in more mature green markets, where formal certification systems and established eco-labels carry more institutional weight, individual environmental knowledge may play a less dominant role, so the findings should be generalized carefully.

The practical implications are concrete. Platforms and sellers, the study suggests, should invest in transparent, specific, and consistent environmental information, including clear eco-labels and user-friendly green filters, to counter the skepticism that greenwashing breeds. They should also design digital experiences that genuinely foster engagement, since engagement remains a meaningful pathway even if it is not sufficient on its own. Most importantly, businesses and policymakers should treat consumer competencies as strategic infrastructure: educational initiatives that build environmental knowledge and digital literacy will, on this evidence, do more to convert clicks into sustainable purchases than any amount of promotional content alone. The study’s limitations, a convenience sample, cross-sectional self-reported data, and a single national context, mean the results are associative rather than causal, but the central message stands: in green e-commerce, what consumers know shapes what engagement is worth.

Subject of Research: The role of digital engagement, digital literacy, and environmental knowledge in green consumer purchase intention in Vietnamese e-commerce

Article Title: Green consumer behavior in e-commerce: The mediating role of digital engagement and the moderating effects of literacy and environmental knowledge

Article References: Nguyen, K. Q. T. (2026). Green consumer behavior in e-commerce: The mediating role of digital engagement and the moderating effects of literacy and environmental knowledge. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45511. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45511

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45511

Keywords: green consumer behavior, e-commerce, digital engagement, digital literacy, environmental knowledge, sustainable consumption, PLS-SEM, greenwashing, Vietnam, online shopping intention, eco-labels, consumer psychology