BHARAT Decision Making Model: Harness an Innovative MCDM Methodology for Recommending Beneficial E-Commerce Website

Abstract

The electronic commerce (e-commerce) business has become increasingly important due to the recent hoopla around online shopping. This is due to the volatility of the situation and disasters such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to keep customers loyal and avoid customer attrition, service and product suppliers were compelled to adjust to the latest developments in digital marketing. Business-to-consumer (B2C) is a key market niche in this market, as companies utilize their websites to offer goods and services directly to customers. That's why B2C wants to be shaped in a way that helps companies and customers establish a reliable, long-lasting connection. As a result, this study showcases the essential criteria that contribute to constructing a profitable B2C e-commerce website. These criteria are leveraged to prioritize and evaluate e-commerce websites (E-WSs). This is a crucial phase in this study to recommend effective E-WSs amongst a set of competitors for customers. This study achieved this phase by constructing a decision-making model. This model can deal with conflicting criteria for preferring E-WSs over each other. The best Holistic Adaptable Ranking of Attributes Technique (BHARAT) is a novel methodology of Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM). This methodology is proposed in the constructed decision-making model to evaluate and rank E-WSs. Ultimately, we applied this model to real E-WSs, and the findings indicated that E-WS2 is optimal; otherwise, E-WS4 is the worst one.