Prioritizing the Solutions to Reverse Logistics Barriers for the E-Commerce Industry in Pakistan Based on a Fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS Approach

Muhammad Hamza Naseem, Jiaqi Yang and Ziquan Xiang
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Muhammad Hamza Naseem: School of Transportation and Logistics Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430063, China
Jiaqi Yang: School of Transportation and Logistics Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430063, China
Ziquan Xiang: School of Transportation and Logistics Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430063, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 22, 1-20

Abstract: In the past few years, reverse logistics practices have successfully managed to gain more attention in various industries and among supply chain researchers and experts. This is due to globalization, environmental concerns, and customer requirements, which have asserted industries’ concerns for reverse logistics management. In E-commerce, the process of reverse logistics originates with parcel refusal, undelivered goods, and exchanges. In developing countries like Pakistan, the adoption and implications of reverse logistics are still at their early stages. E-commerce companies give more attention to forward logistics and ignore logistics’ upstream flow in the supply chain. This study aims to identify, as well as list, the barriers and obtain the solutions to those identified barriers, and rank the barriers and their solutions so that logisticians and experts can solve them as per their priority. From the extensive literature review and experts’ opinions, we have found 14 barriers in implementing effective reverse logistics. Eight solutions to those barriers were also found from the literature review. This paper proposed the methodology based on fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (fuzzy-AHP), which used to get the weights of each barrier by using pairwise comparison, and fuzzy technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (fuzzy-TOPSIS) method, which was adopted for the final ranking of solutions to reverse logistics. The case of the Pakistan E-commerce industry is used in the proposed method.

Keywords: reverse logistics; AHP method; TOPSIS method; reverse logistics barriers; E-commerce supply chain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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