**4. A Numerical Illustration**

To demonstrate the efficiency and the applicability of the proposed extension, an example of the evaluation of e-commerce strategies adopted from Stanujki´c et al. [69] is the subject matter of consideration in this section of the paper. Suppose a team of three decision-makers should evaluate three e-commerce development strategies based on five criteria. The e-commerce development strategies (ECDS) and the evaluation criteria are shown in Tables 1 and 2.



**Table 2.** E-commerce development strategy evaluation criteria.


The ratings obtained from the three decision-makers for the proposed strategies are shown in Tables 3–5.

**Table 3.** The ratings received from the first decision-maker.


**Table 4.** The ratings received from the second decision-maker.


**Table 5.** The ratings received from the third decision-maker.


After that, a group evaluation matrix was determined by using Equation (6), whereby all the decision-makers had the same importance ω<sup>1</sup> = ω<sup>2</sup> = ω<sup>3</sup> = 0.33. The group evaluation matrix is presented in Table 6.


**Table 6.** The group evaluation matrix.

In the following step, the ideal and negative ideal solutions shown in Table 7 are determined by applying Equations (23) and (24).


The calculation details obtained by applying the TOPSIS method and the two distance measures are presented in Tables 8 and 9.

**Table 8.** The computational details obtained by using the Hamming distance.


**Table 9.** The computational details obtained by using the Euclidean distance.


The calculation details obtained by utilizing the TOPSIS method and the Hamming distance are presented in Table 8. In this case, all the criteria had the same importance of *w<sup>j</sup>* = 0.20.

As can be observed from Table 8, the most acceptable alternative (i.e., e-commerce development strategy) is designated as ECDS2, which means that the most appropriate e-commerce development strategy is the "social e-commerce adoption" alternative.
