Walmart's E-commerce Strategy: Annotated Bibliography
Onat, O., Anitsal, I., & Anitsal, M. (2014). Activity-based costing in services industry: a conceptual framework for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial Executive, 149-167.
This article provides a conceptual framework for implementing the activity-based costing (ABC) framework in the services sector. The authors particularly rely on the 7P's of marketing model to identify areas that a service firm should pay attention to when considering the ABC approach. According to the article, consideration should be made to the costs and resources associated with product, pricing, place (distribution), promotion, people, process, and physical evidence. By optimizing the costs and resources associated with these aspects, a service firm can gain significant competitive advantage in the marketplace, especially with respect to eliminating unnecessary processes, reducing costs, and delivering competitive prices. A major strength of the article is that it pays attention to the application of ABC in the services sector. This is an area that has received little scholarly attention, in large part because the ABC method has traditionally been used in the manufacturing sector. The article, therefore, provides hope that service firms can as well benefit from ABC. Nonetheless, the article is conceptual in nature, and therefore lacks empirical evidence to demonstrate the usefulness of ABC in service firms. Moreover, the article views ABC implementation from a marketing perspective, thereby ignoring other aspects that may be important for successful ABC implementation such as
More importantly, the article considers the services sector as a whole, providing little or no information about the applicability of the approach in e-commerce services.
Stefano, N., & Freitas, M. (2014). Framework: activity-based costing in services. Brazilian Journal of Management, 7(1), 153-169.
This article is essentially a review of literature on the use of ABC in services. The review included 21 authoritative, scientifically recognized articles published from 1997 to 2011 in well recognized academic journals. This is a major strength of the article. It assembles up-to-date literature on the utilization of ABC in services. The articles are of diverse types, including quantitative studies, qualitative studies, and
case studies. In addition, the articles included in the review relate to firms in the various segments of the services sector, including land transportation, postal services, health care,
law enforcement, hospitality, library services, as well as
financial services. Generally, the review demonstrates that ABC can be profitable in the services industry, especially with respect to optimizing costs, improving service delivery, enhancing customer profitability, and boosting financial performance. This is vital knowledge given that the current study seeks to study how Walmart can deploy the ABC method to improve its competitive advantage in the rigorously competitive e-commerce segment. The review will serve as a source of crucial empirical evidence relating to the use of ABC in services. It will be important to consider some or most of the articles included in the review in the proposed research paper. In…
