A Conceptual Framework for Exploring the Antecedents of Reverse Logistics Performance in E-tailing

The philosophy of accepting product returns and offering post-sale services as a competitive weapon has resulted in the trend of liberal return policies and product-life-cycle services. This has brought on huge reverse logistics challenges, especially for virtual-only retailers lacking logistics experiences. While the importance of reverse logistics in e-commerce has been highlighted, there are few researches addressing distinctive capacities to achieve leading-edge reverse logistics performance for e-tailing. A framework of antecedents of reverse logistics performance is proposed to help identify the major factors that influence e-tailers ’ reverse logistics performances. A series of propositions are presented which serve to direct future research in this area