The world’s first free commercial trading and social commerce site, gotradelive, launched its service in the U.S. today, beginning with supporting businesses across California, the world’s ninth largest economy.  Combining social networking with ecommerce technologies, gotradelive makes it easy for businesses to connect with its customers, suppliers and partners and promote, sell and source products worldwide.

Gotradelive gives small and mid-sized businesses an advantage in how they sell, source and promote products more efficiently and profitably. Its trading platform provides businesses with secure, confidential, verifiable and controlled bidding and sourcing of goods and services within their own private customer and supplier networks.

“We’ve set out to build a solution for small businesses that is their social media equivalent,” Keith Collins, Chief Marketing Officer of gotradelive told TMCnet. “It goes way beyond communication tools and provides commercial capability for businesses, which is what we think businesses really need from a business networking platform.”

Unlike other e-commerce and solutions, gotradelive is free to use and doesn’t charge transaction fees or commission on sales.  A business is up and running on gotradelive in less than an hour by simply registering on the site, downloading their customer or supplier contacts into the system and beginning to trade on their own private commerce network.

“People can manage their networks privately,” added Collins. “You know who your customers are, you know who your trading partners are and often you have different groups of trading partners.”

Gotradelive’s tools and features bring new efficiencies and speed to the way businesses market their products, sell to their customers and source from suppliers. 

Features include social networking and communications tools that make it easy to upload sales and marketing content, forward bidding and selling tools, downward bidding and procurement management tools, customer and supplier network creation tools and currency translation to make it easy to bid, buy and sell globally.

“Gotradelive brings together social networking and ecommerce to create a better way for businesses to connect and trade,” Richard Paul, chief technology officer and co-founder, said in a statement. “It combines aspects of Facebook, Groupon, eBay (News - Alert) and other leading Internet solutions and, in so doing, creates a very new and exciting mobile, social and commercial platform that allows everyone to improve the way they do business.”

It is an ideal platform for businesses that need to increase inventory turnover and improve their cost of goods sold. The platform can help California industries like agriculture, wine, computers and electronics, building supplies and medical supplies move product faster and more cost-effectively.

Gotradelive will work with California trade and industry associations, as well as individual businesses, to introduce, pilot and broadcast its free service within California industries.  The campaign works with the Monterey Bay International Trade Association (MBITA) and TradePort.org, a statewide information and trade promotion services portal, which will promote gotradelive as a platform for import, export and trade promotion service organizations in California. 

Anyone can use Gotradelive at no cost to reach and do business with as many companies as they choose.  For businesses to customize their communications and web pages, the program only charges businesses $15 a month.