Antecedents of Supply Chain Performance: Evidence from Online Clothing Sector of Pakistan

Abstract

Online purchasing has enabled customers to search, obtain information about, and buy any specific product offering with many conveniences of effort, time, and cost. At the same time, it has exerted pressure on companies running online businesses on thinking to differentiate themselves between the competitions in order to increase their performance throughout the supply chain. Therefore, this research study emphasized on evaluating what influence customer relationship management, information sharing and outsourcing had on the supply chain performance of the online clothing sector of Pakistan. Taking customer relationship management, information sharing and outsourcing as independent variables while supply chain performance as the dependent variable of this study. Primary data for this research was gathered using an adopted questionnaire sample from both male and female clothing sector employees and managers of the twin cities i.e. Rawalpindi and Islamabad during the pandemic (SARS-COV-2) period. The convenience and purposive sampling technique were used for data collection from the sample size of 400 whereas Pilot Testing was done initially to ensure the internal consistency as the population was undefined. Multivariate Assumption Tests and Multiple Regression Analysis were conducted in order to evaluate the data collected from the respondents. Results of the study revealed positive significance of customer relationship management, information sharing, and outsourcing on the supply chain performance. Further, the study suggests that online businesses should focus on building and maintaining long lasting relationships with customers, timely and reliable exchange of information within the organization, and outsourcing their non-capabilities to increase the performance of the supply chain.