Arbinon.com is under continual development. We have no intention of stopping when it comes to making it easier for you to Rule your Realm. Many of our competitors have built a software, gotten lazy, and only make small changes here and there. Their founders made a cash cow and are onto new ventures. That's not our thinking.
Amazon is changing a lot and so must we. We started programming arbinon.com in January 2018.
Technically speaking, the version of arbinon.com is in it's 3rd generation. We've rolled with real people's feedback and discoveries of limitations, inconsistencies and errors from Amazon's feeds and have done our best to create a rock solid system. Sometimes that has meant falling on our sword and rebuilding some parts from scratch. That meant painful delays to our release schedule, but it's for the best.
Sometimes that means we need to take two steps forward and one step back, in order to take a running leap at a particular problem or business need. As a result this can introduce limitations to Amazon / FBA workflows, workflows in our system and just bugs.
We want this platform to be superior in capability to what our competitors are offering.
Keep in mind, this entire platform consists of hundreds of thousands of lines of code. A massive database with hundreds of tables of data, millions upon millions of rows of data and all this done by just one guy. The platform is based on several separate programs talking to each other on different servers and making all that work together is extremely complex.
With that said we know of a few limitations in our platform that may limit your success on our platform and want to be as up-front on this as possible:
- Currently, we're Amazon FBA first
- Our founder and some of our members do Merchant Fulfilled on Amazon, are on other marketplaces in Canada and the US, and also Shopify and Woocommerce. We have not built in a lot of workflows for Merchant Fulfilled.
- Bundles and Multi-packs
- Our Founder does bundles and multipacks on a limited basis. We are planning future support for both of these. We don't want to say too much on this topic yet, except to reiterate that it is coming.
- Expiry Dates
- See our notes on this page (click here).
- Hazmat
- See our notes on this page (click here).
- Disclaimer about some screenshots in our help and knowldgebase
- For the purpose of documentation, we're using some screenshots from the Founder's account. Sometimes those are fuzzed out so you can't see sensitive information.
- They say the shoemaker's kids have the worst shoes. Many of the screenshots is an actual report from our Founder's account. He has been using arbinon.com for all of his Amazon business for about 3 years now.
- He started tracking purchases and sending in FBA Inbound Shipments way back the system didn't even have the FIFO COGS engine, and many of the screens and capabilities it has today.
For example, at one point, there were some serious bugs in the way that inventory data was synced with Amazon, and some of those values are still in his account on SKUs that he hasn't sold in years. Those values are a throwback to when that data came into the system in a broken state and was never fixed or updated.
We are leaving those for now because we are planning an "Inventory Reconciliation" feature at some point in the near future, and will do a major cleanup on this account first as part of the testing. The effect of that "broken data" was inventory counts were "off" (drifted from true) caused by the system. The new "Inventory Reconciliation" would perform some validation and post fixes to individual SKUS for our members automatically or manually by our support team.
Since FR05, we haven't seen any drift caused by the system. So any drift in the system today should leave real-world corrections that need to be made by you (theft, damages, write-offs, etc.).