Evaluating potential quality of e-commerce order fulfillment service: A collective intelligence-driven approach

Abstract

E-commerce order fulfillment service (E-COFS) plays a pivotal role in shaping consumer behavior in online marketplaces. The strategic outsourcing of the service allows e-commerce sellers to prioritize their core business areas, enhance customer satisfaction, and minimize fulfillment costs. However, a critical challenge lies in appraising the potential quality of E-COFS provided by third parties, especially when lacking historical information. To address this, this paper first designs a generalized framework for guiding the construction of the quantitative model for evaluating the potential quality of E-COFS. The proposed framework unfolds in three stages: (1) evaluating potential effectiveness of an E-COFS through quantifying stakeholders’ potential satisfaction from the E-COFS plan tailored by its provider, (2) evaluating its potential feasibility by quantifying the potential performance of the E-COFS quality management system (E-COFS-QMS) built by the provider on supporting the plan, and (3) integrating the above two parts to gauge the potential quality of the E-COFS. Building upon this framework, this paper then designs a novel quantitative model. Specifically, this model adopts the linguistic subjective judgment representation method and introduces basic uncertain linguistic information to achieve computing with words. Multiple stakeholders within e-commerce sellers are tasked with articulating their requirements, their preferences and expectations, and consensus reaching process is conducted to obtain the acceptable consensus among these stakeholders. Multiple experts from various domains are tasked with giving their subjective judgements on the performances of E-COFS and E-COFS-QMS, and a method of weighting individual judgments, which respects the reliabilities of individual judgements and the overall similarity in knowledge structures among the experts, is adopted to effectively tap into collective intelligence. Finally, a case study is conducted to validate the validity and feasibility of the proposed quantitative model.