Digital Supply Chain Integration and Sustainable Performance: Unlocking the Green Value of Data Empowerment in Resource-Intensive Sectors
In the rapidly evolving digital economy, the expansion of business-to-business e-commerce ecosystems has compelled traditional industries to integrate into digital supply chains to achieve sustainable development. Industrial e-commerce is no longer limited to online transactions but extends to the digital transformation of backend operations. Drawing upon the perspective of the digital business ecosystem, this study investigates how digital supply chain integration, manifested through digital transformation, impacts energy efficiency. By utilizing a panel fixed effects model and advanced text mining techniques on a dataset of 721 listed firms in the resource-intensive sectors of China spanning from 2011 to 2023, this research constructs a novel index to quantify corporate digital maturity based on semantic analysis. The empirical results demonstrate that digital transformation significantly enhances energy efficiency by facilitating optimized resource allocation and data-driven decision making required by modern digital markets. Mechanism analysis reveals that green innovation functions as a pivotal mediator that bridges the gap between digital investments and environmental performance. Furthermore, this relationship is found to be contingent upon corporate social responsibility strategies, ownership structures, and the scale of the firm. This study contributes to the electronic commerce literature by elucidating how traditional manufacturers can leverage digital technologies and green innovation to navigate the twin transition of digitalization and sustainability, offering theoretical implications for platform governance in industrial sectors.
Authors
- W. H. Li
- Di Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0539-9279)
- Na Li (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7911-8903)
- Yuqing Zhan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7578-5751)
Institutions
- Harbin Engineering University (CN)
- Qingdao University of Technology (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Journal of theoretical and applied electronic commerce research
- Published
- 2026-01-14
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/jtaer21010038
- Primary Topic
- Digital Transformation in Industry
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00