BT Tradespace spruces up its search

BT Tradespace, the service designed to help small businesses set up an online presence, is to make it easier for its users to sell directly to the consumer.

The free service, which launched in April, is already linked to the online payment service PayPal but its upcoming evolution will make the search capabilities on the site more powerful.

Ivan Croxford, head of BT Tradespace, admitted that due to not advertising to consumers yet, BT Tradespace has experienced "relatively low" traffic to the site's 28,000 business user profiles. However, he added, BT will start to advertise the service to consumers within the next couple of months.

Bill Murphy, managing director of BT Business, said greater integration between BT Tradespace and BT's more traditional online and paper-based directory services will occur in the near future.

Speaking at the London launch of Small Business Week 2007 - a collaboration between BT, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the British Chambers of Commerce - Murphy revealed BT would be "adding more and more ecommerce capabilities to [BT Tradespace] as we go forward".

Another BT Tradespace enhancement, due to roll out towards the start of next week, will be increased capabilities for social networking between users.

Croxford said some users are finding that having BT Tradespace profiles alongside their own company websites is benefiting them in search engine rankings. "Today, just having a website alone does not cut it," he said.

David Meyer writes for ZDNet UK