Driving Sustainable Consumption Online: The Interplay of Green Digital Marketing and Digital Literacy in Shaping Purchase Intentions for Sustainable Coffee in Urban Ethiopia’s E-Commerce

The growth of e-commerce in emerging economies presents a critical opportunity to steer digital consumption toward sustainability, yet the mechanisms that drive online green purchases in these contexts remain underexplored. This study examines how green digital marketing signals, specifically eco-labeling and sustainability claims, influence the online purchase intention for sustainable coffee in urban Ethiopia, introducing digital literacy as a key moderating factor. Grounded in an integrated framework of Signaling Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior, the research model was tested using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) on data from 451 urban e-commerce consumers. The results confirm that both eco-labeling and sustainability claims significantly enhance purchase intention, with green trust serving as a significant partial mediator. A pivotal finding is that digital literacy positively and significantly moderates the relationship between green trust and purchase intention, indicating that consumers with higher digital competence are more effective at translating trust into purchase decisions. These findings underscore that the success of online green marketing is contingent not only on signal credibility but also on user capability, offering crucial insights for platform design and policy in emerging digital markets.