Research On The Application Of Activity-based Costing Under The Environment Of E-commerce

China’s economy is moving towards a new stage of high-quality development,and the 20 th CPC National Congressreport points out that "accelerating the development of the Internet of Things,building an efficient and smooth circulation system,and reducing logistics costs." This is a key part of China’s construction of a modern industrial system,and is an important element in accelerating the construction of a new development pattern and making efforts to promote high-quality development,pointing out the direction for the development of an efficient modern logistics system in China.China’s e-commerce logistics have achieved steady progress in recent years,emerging as a vital player in fighting against the pandemic,ensuring supplies and facilitating social stability.However,the industry is currently grappling with challenges of high costs and low efficiency,highlighting the continued importance of further deepening cost reduction and efficiency enhancement in the “14th Five-Year Plan on Modern Logistics Development Planning”.The majority of e-commerce companies nowadays choose to partner with logistics enterprises to reduce their logistics costs.The fierce industrial competition has constantly tightened the profit margin of logistics enterprises,whose profitability relies heavily on reasonable and effective cost management.Traditional costing methods,which are now starting to reveal their incompetence in comprehensively and accurately reflecting logistics enterprises’ indirect costs,suffer from such drawbacks as the inability to collect costs of operation centers,the inaccurate cost accounting involving various item categories,and the lack of clarity on cost responsibilities.These all reduce the effectiveness of cost information,undermine logistics enterprises’ cost management and control,as well as hurt their efforts to reduce costs and increase productivity.As a new model of enterprise cost management,activity-based costing(ABC)follows the train of thought that claims "resources are consumed for activities,which are in turn consumed for products".By tracking cost drivers,this model allocates indirect costs that logistics enterprises cannot collect,clarifies the attribution of cost responsibilities,and accurately reflects logistics cost information,thus effectively addressing the defects of traditional cost accounting in the e-commerce landscape.Predicated on this backdrop,and motivated by the aspiration to offer cost management references for logistics enterprises in the e-commerce landscape,this study attempted to make up for the shortcomings of traditional cost methods and simultaneously address the existing deficiencies of cost management in logistics enterprises using ABC in a case study involving LZ Logistics Co.,Ltd.,which had been conducting its logistics operations based on the Internet information technology.Moreover,taking into account the characteristics of third-party logistics in e-commerce,which include great dependence on networking and information technology,large volume of custody cargo,fuzzy cost boundaries between item categories,and challenging cost responsibility division,an accounting process aimed at cost management optimization was designed for LZ based on ABC,as follows.To begin with,logistics resources consumed by LZ were collected as samples to analyze the specific operations of a logistics enterprise and the consumption motives of logistics costs under the centralized warehousing custody segment for e-commerce businesses,before taking into account the order data of e-commerce companies in the logistics information system to track the cost drivers.Next,the cost drivers were used to calculate the actual costs of item categories under LZ’s e-commerce segment,precisely allocate them,and clarify the cost responsibilities among the three item categories of home appliances,retail goods and auto parts.These eliminated the ambiguity of traditional costing methods and reflected the actual profits and losses of logistics operations carried out for specific item categories.Furthermore,this study improved the relevance of LZ’s cost information decisions and raised the effectiveness of LZ’s logistics resource allocation,thus achieving not only the aforementioned objective of optimizing the cost management under the e-commerce business segment for a logistics enterprise,but also cost reduction and productivity rise.Lastly,based on the above findings,the application of ABC for logistics cost management were summarized,and corresponding suggestions were given to offer a new perspective for logistics enterprises in their cost reduction and productivity raising endeavors in the e-commerce landscape.