Tradebox (E-Trader) ? Why pay money for an ebay sage package?
Tradebox is an ebay sage package that downloads your transactions via the ebay api automatically. Tradebox may sound like an ideal solution for many ebay sellers but it does come with a very high cost involved.
Ideally most sellers would want to buy a reasonably costed package for around £57-£87 that is a one off fee, includes upgrades for at least a year with no yearly costs involved. In essense buyers want an all in one package.
Who would pay a subscription to use windows every year? not me for sure!! if I pay for some software I do not expect a subscription service unless the software is a anti virus.
With TradeBox (formally known as E-trader) you have to first pay the basic fee of around £250 then you need to purchase the Sage Accounts line 50 package. This is expensive to use if you are anything but a gold or platinum ebay power seller, so anything less then you are putting out good money for a bad return on investment.
The comes the yearly fees for both Tradebox and sage, so lets add up the maths here:
- base start fees - £250 + sage = approx £400
- Yeary fees on top around £250
- say we use the software for the average ebay lifetime of 6 years
This gives an overall cost over the life time of your ebay business is around £1900 !!!!!!!!!!!
If you are paying this much money out of your ebay profits then you are already losing profits from day one. Where else would you pay approx £2000 for a simply package that allowed you to download your ebay transactions, collated the information and give you a few stats and graphs on your sales then allow you to export your sales to such sources as excel? In all honesty you would not pay this type of money for any software never mind a software package such as this.
if you wish to join the Tradebox gravy train then by all means go and buy the package (im sure they will love taking more money of ebay sellers who have not worked out the full cost to them) but if you wish to save your hard earned cash and take a more profitable and sensible route then we do have an answer.
We will initially profide a free excel spread sheet for anyone to use or share to track all of your ebay sales and work out your costs and profit and loss amounts per month and year. We also have in development a free tool that will allow you to import all of your ebay sales from the downloadable spreadsheet that ebay provides via your sellers dashboard.
You will be able to get information on your sales etc as well.
We will be putting an opt-in list for people who want to beta test the product around mid january and beta will be underway in early feb to enable us to iron out all the bugs before we release this on the web site for FREE. Yes free with no fee to buy and no subscription service like the platform one product Tradebox.
Note that all of the opinions in this post are personal opinions on the ebay software provided by this company and we are not in any way suggesting that platform ones business practices are in any way underhand or misleading. We will be covering the other ebay packages available by other companies over the next few weeks and discuss the cost and subscriptions (if any) that they also incur.
