Multi-criteria evaluation of circular e-commerce shipping pack alternatives under a spherical fuzzy environment

This study presents a pure multi-criteria decision-making framework to select circular packaging alternatives for an e-commerce shipping pack that includes the outer box, void filler, sealing tape, and return handling. Packaging decisions in e-commerce are inherently multi-objective: they must protect products and reduce damage, keep total cost low, avoid dimensional-weight penalties, fit recovery infrastructure, and lower life-cycle emissions. These choices are often made with linguistic assessments, uncertain return rates, and heterogeneous customer behaviors across markets. To address this setting, we integrate Spherical Fuzzy Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SF-SWARA) for criteria weighting and Spherical Fuzzy Combined Compromise Solution (SF-CoCoSo) for alternative ranking. A criteria system is defined to reflect operational and circularity priorities, including protective performance, total cost of ownership, compatibility with local collection and recycling systems, consumer acceptance and convenience, hygiene and contamination risk in returns, feasibility of implementing reverse logistics, and carbon footprint. An expert panel expresses relative importance and alternative performance using spherical fuzzy linguistic terms, and SF-SWARA yields a normalized weight vector. Five alternatives are assessed under the same spherical fuzzy environment: a single-use recyclable pack, a reusable pack, a compostable pack, a deposit-return pack, and a minimal-pack design. SF-CoCoSo generates compromise scores by combining additive and multiplicative principles, enabling balanced choices under conflicting objectives. Robustness is examined through sensitivity analysis that perturbs key weights and by benchmarking rankings against an alternative spherical fuzzy method. The framework provides a transparent, replicable decision aid for e-retailers, third-party logistics providers, and packaging designers, supporting context-specific adoption of circular packaging while safeguarding fulfillment performance and customer experience.