Like many established eBay sellers, we are always looking for ways to streamline our processes and maximise profit. Whether this is sourcing our products from suppliers who can give us the greatest discounts or finding the most economical method of shipping, the need to maintain competitive pricing drives us to trim excess everywhere we can. Every aspect of our operation was placed under this ‘profitability’ microscope, including time costs. The most significant time cost was accounting for our sales, which had started to become a barrier to growth. Like many SMEs we used Sage Line 50, which gave us an impressive control over our stock and financials but required quite a bit of data input.
The discovery of Tradebox Finance Manager for eBay removed this issue, literally overnight. Tradebox links directly with our eBay account and automatically compiles our sales data in Sage saving us about 2 days administration every week. Tradebox creates all customer and invoice records in Sage, depletes our stock for each product we sell, downloads all our eBay and PayPal fees, automatically calculates the VAT liability and provides us with separate analysis on our eBay sales.
Because of the automation and time savings, Tradebox has allowed us to really enhance the power of Sage Line 50 which has now become central to our sales operation. We now synchronise Tradebox with eBay twice a day; once in the morning and once in the afternoon. All new sales which are downloaded are allocated for dispatch, a delivery note and invoice printed and the product shipped to the buyer. At the same time our stock is depleted, allowing providing us advanced warning of when to re-order from our suppliers. Using Tradebox and Sage also allows us to automatically categorise our sales to separate categories within our accounts, as well as providing us with a raft of analysis which examines and compares monthly sales income, monthly unit sales, individual product performance, analysis of income against fees, a breakdown of fees etc. We have used Tradebox for nearly 2 years now and it has had a significant impact on our eBay sales operation. The support is excellent and new features, which are intelligently thought out to enrich the solution, are routinely released.
2 Responses
Sounds like it works well for you. I bought the bundled “start up” version for £298.00. It takes about 3 hours to sync 60 transactions. Postage data/combined purchases are often out. Support is through sage not tradebox and consists in mainly ums and arhs. The customer database is so slow as to make it unusable. I certainly would not recommend it. To be honest I’m surprised they even continue to sell it.
Hi Jim, I’m a director of Platform One, the authors of Tradebox. The starter package should be downloading and processing orders at around 1 per second and be 100% accurate. As you have stated Sage supply and support the Starter package and we have not been made aware of your issues. If you contact the Tradebox help desk on 0191 280 4279 or [email protected], we will investigate the issues you are experiencing and provide you with the support you require to rectify them. There are many reasons why the performance of Tradebox could be degraded, such as the way it has been set up or the PC being used, and these can often be resolved very quickly.