Crowdshipping for reverse logistics: unlocking sustainability, trust, and fairness

This study investigates the integration of crowdshipping (CS) into e-commerce reverse logistics, specifically applied to the parcel transport stage between return points and transhipment facilities. Several barriers have limited CS adoption in forward logistics, such as trust, privacy, and security concerns due to direct customer–crowdshipper interaction, and the inability to offer bundled CS tasks that would enable attractive compensation schemes, but these constraints are mitigated in this transport-stage-focused reverse logistics setting. The proposed CS-integrated system operates in a business-to-business (B2B) context, eliminating customer contact and allowing bundled CS task assignment, thereby providing a more secure and operationally efficient setting for CS deployment. In this study, operational and external costs (i.e., per-kilometre social costs) for both conventional and CS-integrated reverse logistics systems are modelled and simulated across diverse spatial and demographic contexts, system scales, configurations, and levels of CS supply and behavioural dynamics. These simulations generate a large database that identifies the conditions under which the CS-integrated system can achieve operational and/or environmental advantages compared with the conventional system. Using a comprehensive simulation experiment based on systematically generated parameter combinations (45,000 simulation runs) and applying decision tree analysis, we find that the CS-integrated system reduces operational costs in nearly all cases, with savings reaching up to 70 % , particularly under conditions with sufficient CS supply and high participation willingness (i.e., low sensitivity to detour and compensation). However, environmental benefits are more context-dependent, emerging mainly in low-density, large-area settings where detours remain minimal. The study underscores the potential of CS to enhance the cost efficiency of reverse logistics while highlighting the importance of policy interventions that limit detours and induced travel demand in the CS-integrated system to ensure that sustainability gains are fully realised.