Online retailer NetShop had been drastically losing market share to its competitors. The management hired a reputed consulting firm to advise the company. The experts from the consulting firm pointed out that the company primarily lost out on its competitive advantage due to its poor customer service, including slow response times to customer inquiries and unclear return policies. These ineffective policies and procedures led to many disgruntled customers and a steady migration to more customer-friendly retailers. NetShop can best solve its problem by working on its:

a. immobile assets.
b. support activities.
c. resource flows.
d. resource stocks.

Activity-based costing (abc) is not truly a cost collection mechanism as much as it is an inventory valuation method. the main purpose for implementing an activity-based cost system is to try to overcome some of the cost distortions that occur in traditional costing from product differences when there are variations in size and complexity. however, one of the disadvantages of utilizing abc is that the additional information gathering necessary to implement costing with that level of detail might be beyond the reach of some companies with resource or financial constraints. with this in mind, what kinds of industries or companies do you think would benefit most from using activity-based costing and why? in designing or modifying an accounting system to capture appropriate costs for abc, what considerations do you think would need to be made?