Abstract

Commercial Internet rapidly developed through Business to Customer (B2C) businesses since 1990s. B2C provides free online services and discounted shopping to customers. There are lots of B2C firm alternatives in the internet for a customer who seeks for a profitable business. The selection among these B2C alternatives is a multiattribute decision-making problem with many tangible and intangible criteria under vagueness and impreciseness. In this paper, we propose a hesitant fuzzy linguistic analytic hierarchy process method for the selection among B2C firms. Hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets are used for the assessments in the pairwise comparison matrices. An ordered weighted averaging operator is used for aggregation operator. A sensitivity analysis is also given to check the robustness of the obtained result.

Introduction

Digitization of commerce has a vital part in today’s economy. Customers can easily find alternative products in electronic marketplaces which indeed form a highly competitive environment for all businesses [50]. On the one hand, digitization brings various new tools for companies to reach customers but on the other hand, it brings various challenges because of competition. An alternative e-commerce channel is using e-marketplaces, which is an electronic space where sellers and buyers meet and conduct different types of transactions including buying, selling and exchange of information. While the functions of an e-marketplace are the same as those of a physical one, digital systems provide more efficiency by providing more updated information and various support services, and easy executions of transactions. Turban et al. [45] defined three main functions of an e-marketplace as matching of buyers and sellers, facilitation of transactions and institutional infrastructure. The sub-functions listed under matching of buyers and sellers are determination of product offerings, aggregation of different products, search functionality for each party, information publication about the price and details of a product and matching the seller’s offerings with the buyer’s preferences, and comparison of the product prices. The second group, facilitation of transactions, is composed of sub-functions such as communication between buyers and sellers, informs of posting request for proposal, or posting buyers’ requests, delivery of information, goods or services to buyers, transfer of payments to sellers, escrow services, and finally publishing a rating system that show the reputation of the sellers. In the final group, institutional infrastructure, legal functionalities such as resolution of disputes, intellectual property protection, monitoring of transactions and providing market information about competition of government regulations take place. E-marketplaces provide a very important channel for sellers because they have high traffic which means high amount of potential customers. Most of the customers prefer accomplishing their buying process from a marketplace because of trust and other services.