Using the Binary Matrices for Modeling the Supply Chain Issues of Virtual Shops: An Evidence from Pakistan

Abstract

The study aims at developing a list of supply chain issues in virtual shops and construct a hierarchal model of those supply chain issues with the purpose to prioritize them. It is also geared towards unfolding the inter-relationships of those issues. The research design entails comprehensive review of literature and qualitative analysis following the collection of primary data from panel of experts utilizing Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) coupled with Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification (MICMAC) as a methodology, this paper intends to probe into the supply chain issues creating bottlenecks in virtual shops’ operations. ISM is conducive to find the influential supply chain issues whereas MICMAC classifies and analyzes the supply chain issues based on their driving and dependence powers. The results of ISM point out that the supply chain issue ‘data centers affected by natural disasters’ is the most influential issue since it occupies bottom level of ISM model whereas supply chain issues ‘long lead time’ and ‘customer unavailability’ occupy top of ISM model being least critical. Results of MICMAC disclosed that issues ‘high delivery costs’, ‘long lead time’ and ‘customer unavailability’ are categorized as dependent whereas ‘network errors’ and ‘data centers affected by natural disaster’ are classified as independent. All the other issues are contained into linkage cluster while no supply chain issue is autonomous depicting that all the issues are relevant. Over the past few years, the extent of research on e-commerce logistics and supply chain has been increased. Most of the researches have been conducted to create awareness on the importance of logistics and supply chain in e-commerce industry. But the supply chain issues faced by virtual shops have not been comprehensively identified in any research till date. This study attempt to find those issues and prioritize them. The findings of the study provide understanding of most influential and most influenced supply chain issues so that the practitioners can set their priority actions. This study has contributed theoretically and possess practical implications for the stakeholders of virtual shops as well. In view of the fact that the study is conducted without financial assistance and data is collected from medium-sized panel in a field setting, the study is limited to an extent.