Foundational factors for planning and strategizing e-commerce reverse logistics under the effect of pandemic – A Study using AHP

Abstract

Reverse Logistics has now become an integral part of all supply chains, supply chains are now not limited from supplier’s supplier to customers’ customer but has become became a loop where from customer it comes back in a few cases and can end at different stages. The effectiveness of reverse logistics plan is of utmost importance for ensuring customer satisfaction, as much as managing the direct flow of goods to customer is important for making profit the unwanted return of products holds an important position in maintaining the finances and also customer’s loyalty. To provide efficient service the planning needs to be done in such a way that it contains all important aspects and in this pandemic time when travel was restricted in different phases and forms planning for the reverse logistics became an integral part. Already a few researchers have identified area specific or product specific factors for reverse logistics but in this pandemic time the scenarios have changed, ecommerce has seen a rise and that escalates the rise of return orders. Maintaining the reverse logistics will give business some unparallel advantages if planning is done correctly. In this paperthe result shows the factors (their rank)as per their importance level for planning out reverse logistics operations in ecommerce industry during tough times like this pandemic- COVID-19. All factors are necessary to be considered but the level of importance is different and thus our results(ranks) helps in decision making process. These factors will give an overall idea of areas which needs specific attention and also needs special attention in order to maintain safety with the continuous changing reverse logistics ecosystem. These factors will make supply chain more agile andwill help reverse logistics supply chain to consider a lot of the uncertainties over the decision horizon.