Entries Tagged 'Online Business' ↓

New site launched – Spares Next Day

We are pleased to announce the launch of www.sparesnextday.co.uk – a site offering consumables like hoover bags and moving on to a vast array of other domestic spares.

The challenge here has been in presenting products like vacuum bags for sale in a way that allows the customer to find their exact item easily, whilst offering a broad range of both genuine and compatible choices.  With an off-the-shelf ecom application, this becomes more and more of a challenge as the product range expands.

Cartridge Save improves Top 10 Hitwise ranking

Cartridge Save Top 10 on Hitwise

We are very proud to announce that Cartridge Save, has not only maintained its Hitwise Top 10 award for the first half of this year, but has improved its ranking to number 4 in the Shopping and Classifieds – Office Supplies category. Not only this, but it is the number 1 specialist printer consumables online retailer!

Cartridge Save have been working with us since 2003 when we launched their first ecommerce website.

Well done everyone!

Our Payment Service Provider Axiar is acquired by UPG plc

Having built, managed and run Axiar for the past four or so years, we have now handed it on to UPG plc, the UK’s largest independently owned card processing gateway.

We have loved building and improving Axiar over the years including acheiving its status as a Level 1 PCI-DSS compliant payment service provider. Trading cryptocurrencies becomes a profitable business (learn more at bitcoinrush.info), so it is important to have a reliable payment provider. UPG is a great company and we know its in safe hands.

Standard release now follows:

UPG plc purchase Axiar

Universal Payment Gateway plc (www.upg.co.uk) thought to be the UK’s largest independently owned card processing gateway have completed their 3rd PSP acquisition in the last 12 months, following the successful acquisitions of the PSL portfolio and Secure Hosting Ltd. The purchase of Axiar Payment Solutions Ltd (www.axiarpayments.co.uk) in June 2010 increasingly adds to the portfolio of e-commerce specialist payment software companies.

Axiar has been delivering strong growth in the mid market e-commerce sector with a particular skill set in recurring payments for travel companies and high speed ecommerce merchants. The merchants being served by Axiar have been processing via UPG for some time and will continue to get the same great service. Of the transaction Miles Carroll, CEO of UPG plc comments “We are really happy to have completed the acquisition of Axiar and will see great benefit from the transaction. Axiar has a great reputation as a Tier 1 provider of payments and we see a really good fit within our stable of brands. We are proud of our service and have seen strong growth through the subsidiary brands and the movement of 2 existing PSP’s to the platform this year will make for a great year in 2010.” The sentiment was echoed by Jonathan Clark, MD of Axiar, “Like a number of PSP’s we have been using UPG as our route to the banks and found the service and systems to be excellent. The significant investment going into the UPG platform and the already rich feature set, made it the obvious choice for our clients; we are very pleased with the transaction and know our business is in safe hands”

UPG have been going through an expansion process and have added two new data centres to the pool in 2009 & 2010 with one additional data centre going live in November 2010. The business has invested heavily in IBM blade processing technology and Cisco networking systems and by Christmas 2010, over 100 new IBM servers and NetApps devices will have been deployed as part of the tech refresh; this investment in hardware and networking has made it possible to safely absorb the acquisitions into the gateway infrastructure.

UPG continues to enjoy double digit growth and has not ruled out further acquisitions during 2010.

Whilst exact numbers have not been released, it was confirmed that the deal was entirely funded from UPG’s cash reserves.