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The impact of sustainability programs on consumer purchase behavior: Evidence from Amazon

By Davide Proserpio, Ali Goli, Tyler Mangini, Ken Lau, Daniela Yu
2025
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In 2020, Amazon launched the Climate Pledge Friendly (CPF) program to make it easy for customers to discover and shop for products with sustainability certifications. In this paper, we measure the causal impact of products qualifying for CPF on consumer purchase behavior. Using a dataset of about 45 thousand products spanning three categories, and a Difference-in-Differences identification strategy, we show that joining CPF leads to a 13.3% increase in Gross Merchandise Sales, 12.5% increase in sales, and 4.4% increase in shipped units in the next 12 weeks after adoption. These results are robust to different estimators, two identification strategies, longer time windows (24 and 48 weeks), and controlling for price, promotions, ad spend, and ratings and reviews. Finally, we show that products with low visibility as measured by product page views, and consumable products benefit the most from the program.
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IN, TS, Hyderabad
Welcome to the Worldwide Returns & ReCommerce team (WWR&R) at Amazon.com. WWR&R is an agile, innovative organization dedicated to ‘making zero happen’ to benefit our customers, our company, and the environment. Our goal is to achieve the three zeroes: zero cost of returns, zero waste, and zero defects. We do this by developing products and driving truly innovative operational excellence to help customers keep what they buy, recover returned and damaged product value, keep thousands of tons of waste from landfills, and create the best customer returns experience in the world. We have an eye to the future – we create long-term value at Amazon by focusing not just on the bottom line, but on the planet. We are building the most sustainable re-use channel we can by driving multiple aspects of the Circular Economy for Amazon – Returns & ReCommerce. Amazon WWR&R is comprised of business, product, operational, program, software engineering and data teams that manage the life of a returned or damaged product from a customer to the warehouse and on to its next best use. Our work is broad and deep: we train machine learning models to automate routing and find signals to optimize re-use; we invent new channels to give products a second life; we develop highly respected product support to help customers love what they buy; we pilot smarter product evaluations; we work from the customer backward to find ways to make the return experience remarkably delightful and easy; and we do it all while scrutinizing our business with laser focus. You will help create everything from customer-facing and vendor-facing websites to the internal software and tools behind the reverse-logistics process. You can develop scalable, high-availability solutions to solve complex and broad business problems. We are a group that has fun at work while driving incredible customer, business, and environmental impact. We are backed by a strong leadership group dedicated to operational excellence that empowers a reasonable work-life balance. As an established, experienced team, we offer the scope and support needed for substantial career growth. Amazon is earth’s most customer-centric company and through WWR&R, the earth is our customer too. Come join us and innovate with the Amazon Worldwide Returns & ReCommerce team!
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Applied Scientist, Artificial General Intelligence
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Sr. Applied Scientist, Campaign and Creative
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