Benchmarking sustainable E‐commerce enterprises based on evolving customer expectations amidst COVID‐19 pandemic

The 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) pandemic has seriously impacted the performance of all types of businesses. It has given a tremendous structural boost to e‐commerce enterprises by forcing customers to online shopping over visiting physical stores. Moreover, customer expectations of the digital and operational capabilities of e‐commerce firms are also increasing globally. Thus, it has become crucial for an e‐commerce enterprise to reassess and realign its business practices to meet evolving customer needs and remain sustainable. This paper presents a comprehensive performance evaluation framework for e‐commerce enterprises based on evolving customer expectations due to the COVID‐19 pandemic. The framework comprises seven primary criteria, which are further divided into 25 sub‐criteria, including two sustainability factors, namely, environmental sustainability and carbon emissions. The evaluation approach is then practically demonstrated by analyzing the case of three Indian e‐commerce firms. The results are obtained using a multi‐criteria decision‐making (MCDM) method, namely, Fuzzy VIKOR, to capture the fuzziness of the inherent decision‐making problem. Further, numerical analysis is conducted to evaluate and rank various e‐commerce enterprises based on customer expectations and satisfaction benchmarks. The findings explain the most important criteria and sub‐criteria for e‐commerce businesses to ensure customer expectations along with their economic and environmental sustainability.