Book Consultation
About

Built from running an e-commerce business, not from reading about it

The automation work here started as a practical necessity — not a service offering. It became one because the problems it solved turned out to be the same ones most online sellers face.

Karol Labuda — Labuda Automation
Background

Where this experience actually comes from

Labuda Automation is a one-person consultancy run by Karol Labuda — a UK-based e-commerce operator who has been selling on Amazon FBA and eBay for several years, managing everything from sourcing and logistics to accounting and customer service.

The automation work started internally — building systems to handle the operational overhead of running a multi-channel business: settlement reports, invoice processing, inventory updates, supplier emails. n8n, combined with Sage and various marketplace APIs, became the backbone of how the business runs.

At some point, the time saved and the reliability of those systems made it clear that other sellers were spending the same hours on the same manual work. That's where the consultancy side came from — not from learning automation tools, but from having already applied them to a real business.

The focus remains narrow on purpose: e-commerce operations and accounting workflows. These are the areas where the understanding runs deepest, and where practical, production-ready systems can be built with confidence.

Why It's Different

Why work with someone who runs an e-commerce business

There's a meaningful difference between a developer who's studied the Amazon Seller API and someone who has used it to process their own settlement data every week.

When a VAT classification decision needs to be made, or when a Sage contact deduplication strategy needs to account for customers who enter their postcode differently each time — that's where operational experience matters. The edge cases aren't hypothetical.

🧠

Practical business understanding

The processes I automate are ones I've had to manage myself. That changes how a solution is designed — it's built for the exception as much as the standard case.

🛒

E-commerce operations knowledge

Amazon FBA, eBay, multi-channel inventory, carrier integrations, BaseLinker — not as research topics, but as tools used in a live business.

🎯

Focused, scoped solutions

Every project starts by agreeing exactly what the system will do and what it won't. Scope creep and over-engineering are both problems — I try to avoid both.

🔧

Production-minded from the start

The workflows I build run on real infrastructure and need to keep working when things go slightly wrong. Error handling and monitoring aren't an afterthought.

Approach

How I approach automation work

A good automation project starts with a clear understanding of what the current process actually is — not what it's supposed to be, but what someone does on a Tuesday afternoon when there are 200 new CSV rows to process.

From there, the design is about finding the simplest version of the system that reliably handles the real data. That usually means spending time on edge cases, error states and the 5% of records that don't fit the pattern — because that's where manual work comes back if the automation doesn't account for it.

I work on a small number of projects at a time. Not to create artificial scarcity, but because good automation requires focus during the design and build phase. Spreading thin produces fragile systems.

What to expect

A typical engagement looks like this

  • A 30-minute discovery call to understand your current process
  • A written workflow spec — what the system will do, step by step
  • Build and testing against real data samples you provide
  • Iteration until the output matches what you need
  • Deployment to your infrastructure or a self-hosted environment
  • Documentation and handover — so you understand what's running
  • Optional ongoing support or modifications as your process evolves

Typical stack

n8n (self-hosted) · Sage API · QuickBooks API · Amazon SP-API · eBay Trading API · OpenAI API · PostgreSQL · Redis · Traefik · Ubuntu Server

Let's Talk

If this sounds like the right fit, let's have a conversation

No commitment required from a first call. Bring your process, your current setup and a clear sense of what outcome you're after — and we'll figure out whether automation is the right answer.

Book Consultation See Case Studies