Prioritizing barriers in reverse logistics of E-commerce supply chain using fuzzy-analytic hierarchy process

Several factors like returns, undelivered and damaged goods, exchange, and environmental concern make reverse logistics (RL) inevitable in an E-commerce supply chain. In spite of understanding the importance of RL in current business scenario, most of the companies concentrate on forward logistics, while reverse flow from customer to upstream business is not receiving much interest. Considering this less focused aspect of reverse logistics, the objective of this research is to identify and propose a model to rank the inhibiting variables i.e. the barriers so the logistician can solve them as per the priority. The extensive literature survey and experts' opinion helped in identifying 16 barriers for the study. But the availability of a number of barriers makes evaluating and selecting the most important RL barrier a challenging task and thus it can be dealt with as a multi-criteria decision-making problem. In this paper, a methodology based on analytic hierarchy process has been used to prioritize the barriers of RL. Findings of this paper show that the lack of investment in reverse logistics, lack of understanding about best practices and uncertain return and demand are the three topmost barriers for RL of E-commerce companies.