Member Article

Business investment arriving at Platform One

The increasing popularity of online shopping has helped a Newcastle software firm to build a successful sales platform of its own.

Platform One develops bespoke versions of accounting software giant Sage’s products. Now, after acquiring a £250,000 investment from NEL Capital, the venture capital arm of regional fund management firm NEL Fund Managers, the company is set to develop and launch a new series of ‘next generation’ customer relationship management (CRM) products over the coming year.

As part of the firm’s changes, its brand identity and marketing programme has been overhauled and refreshed by creative agency bgroup.

Platform One was set up in 2003 by a team of former Sage developers to improve the Sage product portfolio for clients including npower and Ford.

After creating a bespoke link for an Ebay trader, which enabled the client to import sales data directly into his accounts, thus saving around five hours work a day, the Platform One team began to research how this might be turned into an off the shelf solution.

The resulting product, Tradebox, won the Most Innovative Product award when it was launched at the annual Sage Expo in 2005, and it has now been developed to work across the three most popular online retail communities - Ebay, Amazon and Play.com.

Operations Director Stephen Bales said: “Most people are now familiar and comfortable with shopping on the internet, but businesses operating in this virtual environment still face the very real demands of collating their financial information - and if their systems can’t communicate properly, they can face many hours of additional work every day.

“Tradebox provides the functionality they need to complete these key tasks, and the fantastic feedback we’ve had from clients over the last three years shows just how much of a difference it makes to their businesses.

“The next phase of our product portfolio will offer a range of enhanced post-sales CRM solutions which will save online traders even more time and money, and we’re confident that they will help us achieve our goals in the UK, as well as, eventually, in overseas markets.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .