Leveraging E-Commerce Platform Rewards to Promote Green Consumption: How Reward Types Influence Consumers’ Sustainable Choices

Promoting sustainable consumption is essential for advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, encouraging consumers to translate sustainable intentions into green consumption remains challenging. Although e-commerce platforms increasingly implement green reward programs, limited research has examined how different reward designs interact with consumers’ psychological characteristics. Across three scenario-based online experiments with Chinese consumers, this research examines how rewards for monetary efforts (RME) and rewards for temporal efforts (RTE) influence green consumption intention. Study 1 (N = 186) shows that reward effectiveness depends on time orientation: future-oriented consumers exhibit stronger green consumption intention under RTE than RME, whereas present-oriented consumers respond more favorably to RME. Study 2 (N = 183) further demonstrates the mediating role of perceived consumer effectiveness, while Study 3 (N = 377) reveals self-control as an important boundary condition underlying consumers’ responses to different reward types. These findings suggest that green rewards do not generate uniform effects, as their effectiveness depends on the fit between reward design and consumers’ psychological characteristics. Ultimately, this study advances sustainable marketing literature by uncovering the psychological fit and boundary conditions dictating green incentive efficacy, thereby broadening perspectives on consumer heterogeneity while offering guidance for platforms to optimize reward programs.