From the ground up, every money amount inputted in arbinon.com is multi-currency enabled.
Being based in Canada, and wanting to sell in the United States, it was clear that the solutions on the market were not supporting the needs of multi-currency operators like most sellers based in Canada and selling in another country. This was actually one of the main reasons arbinon.com got started in the first place, our founder was not happy that the main software out there for creating shipments couldn’t handle Amazon.ca and definitely didn’t handle multi-currency.
What does multi-currency mean, exactly?
There are two key parts to converting money from one currency to another:
You need an amount and you need an exchange rate.
The amount is self-explanatory, and arbinon.com does the heavy lifting for you when it comes to the exchange rates. We are integrated with an online service to get exchange rates several times per day and handle grabbing those rates.
This saves you a lot of time and hassle because you don’t have to do anything about that and the figures you see are based on real exchange rates.
What happens when I input an amount today and the rate changes?
Whenever a price is entered into our system, it is converted based on the “effective date and time” of that transaction. For example, if today we sync an Amazon sales report for a product you sold in USD for a sale that occurred yesterday, arbinon.com is smart enough to know that the “effective date” of that individual transaction was yesterday, so we lookup and use yesterday’s rate. If that transaction has time information and we have synced the exchange rates multiple times that day, we use the exchange rate that matches closest to (but not after) the date PLUS time of that transaction. Complicated? Sure. Accurate, you bet.
The exchange rates from the past do not change. Therefore, the converted amount should never change.
What if I want to override an exchange rate for a date or an individual transaction?
Our system is engineered around best practices and great examples of some of the best enterprise grade systems in the world that specialize in multi-currency. From the ground up we designed the currency conversion functionality to be accurate first, and flexible second.
We have created a “preferential rate selection” logic into our system. What that means is that the rates we get from our exchange rate provider feed the “global” rates used for every customer on our platform. Separately and in addition to that, we have logic that will allow “day override” dates that would be used for YOUR account for that day instead of our default global rates. In addition to that, any individual price in the system could be overridden with a transaction-specific rate for that one transaction.
So, Global -> Day Override Rate -> Transaction Override Rate.
Here’s the rub: although we have the plumbing built into the backend, we do not have any user interfaces built to actually input those override rates. It’s on our roadmap, but didn’t make the cut for the current feature release.
If that is important to you, let us know! Your opinion matters and if enough people need it we can revisit that and prioritize that.
How is it possible to add up CDN and USD amounts?
Every time a price is entered into arbion.com on a screen, or by a backend calculation or Amazon sync, we convert that on the fly.
Every price consists of an amount and the base currency. Based on the effective date, the appropriate exchange rate is applied and we compute the converted amounts for every other currency we support right then and there.
Say you had a $10 USD sale. In the moment we get that data, we would convert and store the $12.25 CAD equivalent (and others we support). So, when you look at that order on one of our screens or on a report, we can pull the CAD or USD amounts based on the currency you want to view it in.
Which currencies does arbinon.com support?
Technically, we can support any currency.
However, to get things rolling, we only activated USD, CAD and MXN because the Amazon North American marketplace region is the primary geographical area where sellers we’re working with are operating.