Member Article

Tradebox gets eBay recommendation

North East based company, Platform One, received another important accolade for its award wining online trading solution Tradebox recently, as it became one of the first UK based product to become recommended by eBay on their UK Solutions Directory. The product, which seamlessly links eBay sales to Sage’s SME accountancy solution, Line 50, is one of two solutions to gain this recommendation on the eBay.co.uk website, the remaining solutions all originating from the United States.

Director of Platform One and ex Senior Analyst Programmer at Sage (UK) Ltd, John Donnelly, said, “We have been working closely with a number of eBay PowerSellers since February this year to ensure Tradebox was truly market driven by incorporating functionality into the product which dealt with the actual needs of the business community selling on eBay. Following this intensive period of consultation we are delighted that this has generated the confidence in Tradebox for eBay to recommend it”.

Tradebox, recent winner of the ‘Most Innovative Sage Addition 2005’ award, resolves an administration burden faced by the rapidly expanding number of businesses successfully selling on eBay. As explained by John Donnelly, “Tradebox allows the user to connect to multiple eBay accounts and configure the product to automatically download and create customer records, invoices and payment records in Sage Line 50. As an example one of our customers regularly sells over 1,000 items a week on the eBay platform. Creating accurate records in Sage for these sales was sometimes taking up to 8 hours a day. Tradebox compiled these details, without a single error, in under 8 minutes, ensuring that the VAT liability for each sale was automatically accounted for depending upon the location of the purchaser. The time savings this has generated has allowed our customer to reinvest this ‘free’ time into expanding their business”.

Focusing within the online traders market, Platform One provide an array of online solutions that are distinctive because of their links to many of Sage’s financial and stock control products. Describing the rational for this approach, John Donnelly explained, “There is a great synergy between the online trading solutions we provide and the requirements of most online traders, mainly because of the links to Sage products which incorporate stock control and financials. With 60% of Platform One’s developers and support staff being ex Sage employees, it made sense to integrate our solutions with accountancy and stock control solutions we have an intimate and historical knowledge of”.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Stephen Bales .