Decide or Default? How Defaults, Information, and Financial Incentives Influence Sustainable Delivery Choices in a Field Experiment

E-commerce delivery choices matter for environmental sustainability, yet checkout designs often steer consumers toward faster, less sustainable options. Research on shifting these choices has focused largely on information and financial incentives, with evidence drawn mainly from stated-preference and controlled settings whose findings may not carry over to actual checkout behavior. This study reports a large-scale field experiment with an e-commerce retailer, in which three commonly studied interventions are varied: (i) the preselection of a delivery option (default), (ii) the provision of sustainability information, and (iii) a small financial incentive.

The empirical design allows identification of both the individual and combined effects of these interventions on the uptake of sustainable delivery. The results show that the sustainable default is by far the most effective intervention. Financial incentives and sustainability information both raise uptake only modestly.

Interaction effects are predominantly negative, suggesting that interventions partly substitute for one another. Taken together, the pattern of effects is consistent with delivery choices being made with limited deliberation at checkout, where interventions requiring minimal effort are especially effective. For retailers, this implies that simple, low-cost changes to checkout design can substantially increase the uptake of sustainable delivery.