Environmental certifications are now a purchasing criterion

The Amazon case

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13.3% additional revenue. That is the measured effect of displaying an environmental certification on an Amazon product page. A study published in April 2025 by researchers from Amazon and the University of Southern California demonstrates this across nearly 90,000 products sold in the United States and Europe on the platform, using three years of real sales data.

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Robust results, across two continents

The study compares the sales performance of a product before and after joining the Climate Pledge Friendly program, designed to identify — via a badge visible throughout the shopping journey — products certified by trusted third parties. Its strength lies in its methodology: it is based on unbiased real sales data, adjusted to eliminate marketing variables that could influence results: advertising, promotions, price, and consumer reviews. Without this adjustment, effects would be overestimated by 19 to 27%.

In the United States, the effect is immediate and lasting: +12.5% in sales value and +4.4% in shipped volumes in the 12 weeks following certification, stable over 24 and 48 weeks. In Europe — UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain — results are even stronger: +15.5% in sales value. The convergence of results across six distinct markets confirms a structural trend.

Consumables and cosmetics: the big winners

Not all categories benefit equally from the program. Consumable products — including cosmetics — significantly outperform: +24.7% in sales value, nearly double the average.

The effect is even stronger for less visible products: certification acts as a discovery lever, directing consumers toward products they would not have found on their own. For a brand without the recognition of a major group, this is a direct competitive advantage.

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Our take: the green gap, a question of trust?

For years, the green gap — the documented divide between stated sustainable purchase intentions and actual behavior — has been interpreted as a consumer consistency problem. The Amazon study invites a different reading. Sustainable purchasing may not be held back by an absence of genuine conviction, but by a lack of trust. When consumers cannot find the answer, they question the reality of a product’s environmental performance and the credibility of those who certify it. The legibility of information at the moment of decision may also play an important role. The study shows that when proof is structured, certified by a recognized third party, and visible at the right moment in the purchase journey, risk aversion decreases and the gap narrows.

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What this means for brands

These results raise a simple question for any cosmetics brand: what environmental data am I able to produce, certify, and make visible at the moment my consumer decides? Brands that answer this question today are not doing compliance. They are building an advantage that this study, for the first time at this scale, validates.

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Based on 11,000 LCAs conducted, Fairglow enables the production of data brands need to get trust : from formula to packaging, within a standardized and certified framework.

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