Vulnerability of multinational retailing delivery service: A case study of TAOBAO

Abstract

With fast growth of broadband internet connection, online shopping has become a popular channel for young people. It is necessary for e-retail to provide a reliable, efficient and powerful delivery system in order to send goods to customer fast and safely. For the past few years, TAOBAO is more and more important e-commerce for China and Taiwan. Risk management is regarded as the important issue in supply chain management, and the vulnerability is the new concept of risk analysis. From the point of view of risk management, the multinational delivery plays an important role more in the field of e-commerce, and logistics process is complicated and has a lot of risks. However, there are fewer studies focused on the vulnerability issue of the logistics process, especially for the case of TAOBAO. If managers understand the most vulnerable parts in all businesses, they could take actions and know how to allocate resources to avoid risks from happening. The objective of this study is to develop an evaluation model and discuss the risk of logistic delivery system via the Fuzzy Cognitive Map (FCM) and Sensitivity Model (SM). This study focuses on a theoretical model intended to capture the dynamic operation process of the multinational retailing delivery service system of TAOBAO. We establish an evaluation model to analyze and describe the vulnerability using the Fuzzy Cognitive Maps and different scenarios are implemented, observed, and appraised. Finally, we will provide some discussion and build management strategy to help managers reduce the risks proactively as well.