Under ABC there will probably be more setup costs charged to low volume products because the setup costs are probably allocated and distributed separately from other overhead costs.
Under ABC not all product lines will have the same setup costs because it is unlikely that every product line has the same number of setups required.
Usually, under ABC the items that are low in volume have more costs charged to them than under a traditional, or other system.
Because of the fact that ABC usually uses more allocation bases than other methods, those low-volume units that may not use much of the overall machine hours or labor hours usually end up with more overhead costs allocated to them under ABC. Traditional costing systems use things like volume (number of units produced or sold) to allocate costs. Therefore, a low-volume product would not be assigned much of the cost to be allocated. Higher-volume products would get more of the costs under traditional costing. However, number of units may not be a good indication of how much that low-volume product actually costs to produce. For example, it takes just as much time to set up a machine for a production run of 10 units as it does for a production run of 100 units. So if activity-based costing is being used and cost per setup and number of setups per product are used to allocate costs, the cost per part produced to set up the machine for a low volume product will be higher than it would be for a high volume product, because the cost will be divided over a smaller number of units for the low-volume product. ABC uses multiple cost pools (one would be as setup costs) related to multiple individual drivers (such as number of setups per product for the setup costs pool). So there will usually be several such allocations done under ABC costing. When costs are allocated by means of that method, low-volume products will usually get more costs allocated to them than under traditional costing methods, and the costs allocated to the low-volume products will be more representative of their true cost.
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