Black2Business is an online one-stop business directory for all product and service providers from the African/Caribbean diaspora within the UK.
The ‘Black Pound’ is important, and the remit of this platform is to facilitate economic empowerment without our community through the support and growth of black-owned businesses, sole traders and freelancers.
Black2Business offers a 100% free basic Listing tier, and offers more premium features at a very reasonable rate. With the exception of Ad revenue and operating costs, Black2Business is a not-for-profit venture, and any revenue generated from user subscriptions is donated to the 100 Black Men of London, a registered charity that offers mentoring that directly benefits the Black community.
The only obligation the platform has upon its members is to embrace a shared responsibility to keep the directory relevant and reliable. Therefore Black2Business strongly encourages the reporting of expired listings and businesses are that no longer in operation.
What makes Black2Business different to the various directories that have preceded it is that it’s ability to tap into mainstream services such as Google Maps, Facebook Messenger and Opentable. It’s not enough for a business to be one of many phone numbers on a long list, but rather to offer a way in which potential customers can connect and engage effortlessly. Black2Business connects to these other leading platforms to enable its users to (for example) conveniently email or ‘live chat’ with product/service providers from their smartphones, to reproduce their menus online, to accept online reservations and the booking of appointments, and many other convenient features etc.. all directly within the listing page itself.
Providers can also customise the User Interface of their dedicated listing page (using tabbed and accordion menus) image galleries, embed promotional videos, publish promotional codes for potential customers and list events related to their business while managing the incoming bookings.
Black2Business was been developed by Jonathan Wildman; a Web Developer based in Brentwood, Essex, and is promoted in collaboration with the 100 Black Men of London, a registered charity that offers mentoring that directly benefits the Black community.
Follow Jonathan on Twitter @jonathanwildman
Black2Business is a community based initiative to promote group economic empowerment within the African/Caribbean diaspora in the UK.
As such, there is strict criteria in terms of what businesses and services are listed on our directory, and these should be either be Black Owned, have a Black Partner or have a Black Director or CEO. Please see our terms of service for a clearer definition of what we consider to be ‘black-owned’.
In short, no.
As long as you are over the age of 16 and your business/ service is Black-Owned’ (as defined by our terms of service) and serves the UK, then you are free to list your venture on Black2Business.
However, if your business is operated by a Private Limited Company, Public Limited Company or is a registered Charity, you are required to state your Companies House registration number or Registered Charity number in the appropriate field when making your listing.
Our main categories are kept deliberately broad to ease search for our users. If you can find a main category that loosely fits your business when listing, please use this. You will then have an opportunity to specify ‘Tags’ or keywords that more specifically describe your venture, eg a Web Designer may list under the ‘Art & Design’ category but specify a Tag of ‘Internet Web Designer / Developer .
The list of Tags are quite comprehensive and should have you covered. However in the rare event that there is no main Category or Tag suitable, please contact us and let us know. We will rectify the matter as soon as possible.
Provided that your listing contains a comprehensive description of your business or service, contains accurate categorisation (including good use of keyword tags) , and contains full location details (using the Google Map), then for all intents and purposes your listing will be in a good position to be indexed by the leading search engines.
Our Professional and Unlimited Listing tiers allow for Schema Markup which is applied automatically based on your listing content.
Schema markup, found at is a form of microdata. Once added to a webpage, schema markup creates an enhanced description (commonly known as a rich snippet), which appears in search results, supported by leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. How a search engine interprets the context of a query will determine the quality of a search result. Schema can provide context to an otherwise ambiguous webpage and tells the search engines what your data means, not just what it says.
Black2Business automatically creates Schema markup from your listings and associated events.
If you find that a listing has incorrect details for a business / service provider (for example an incorrect phone number or web address), or that the business is no longer in operation, please report this to Black2Business. Our platform will only remain relevant if our listings prove reliable.
To report an invalid listing, please go to the listing page and look for the business/organisation header. Please look for the report button as depicted below, click on it and follow the instructions.
As a business directory, we want this platform to remain as accurate and reliable as possible, therefore we realise there are times when your business may temporarily not be trading. In these occasions we ask you not to delete time listing, but to log into your Account Dashboard and flag the listing as ‘temporary closed’. This will remove the listing from our search results, however it will not delete any of your content, so you can click on the link again to restore your listing at an instance.
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We appreciate that not everyone is tech savvy and require a little extra help using a platform such as this. Therefore we are willing to list any business/service on your behalf if you can give us the basic information needed to create a listing.
Please Contact Us for more details.
This is a community based platform, so it is entirely likely that members will list businesses and services they have had experiences with. If somebody has listed your business on your behalf you are able to control the listing and make changes as you see fit by making a claim.
Go to the listing page and look towards the bottom of the page. You will see the following button.
Please follow the instructions and register an account with us if you haven’t already done so. You will then claim ownership of that listing and only you will be able to make changes to it going forward.
Our Listing tiers refer to associated events.
When you subscribe to a to tier, you will be permitted to create a limited number of events tied to your business/service. These will appear on your Listing Page itself and within our platform’s dedicated events section.
Events can be used to publicise things such as ‘tasting sessions’, ‘flash sales’ or ‘product launches’.
The number of events you can create depend on the event plan that is attached to your listing tier. Event plans can be purchased separately should you exceed your allocation.
Once your initial listing has been published, return to your Listing page and click on the following link.
Black2Business offers a variety of ways for you to increase the visibility of your listing.
We are here to help. You may contact us via email or Facebook Messenger live chat.
Please see our Contact page for more details.
You can enable Live Chat with visitors to your listing page using Facebook Messenger. This will require a little configuration on your part. Please click here for instructions on how to enable this functionality.
You may create a ‘widget’ that displays the latest posts on your Facebook fan page. Please click here for full instructions.
In order to accept appointment bookings and manage booking requests and/or an appointment calendar, we reccomend you use a third party service known as TimeKit.
Click here for instructions on how to configure your listing for TimeKit.
If your restaurant is listed on OpenTable please click here for instructions on how to configure your listing page to accept reservations.
Alternatively, if your restaurant is not on OpenTable, you may want to consider TimeKit.
The ‘Professional ‘listing tier allows you to create a button on your listing page that upon a tap/click will allow the visitor to immediately contact you via WhatsApp.
*Please note this feature is NOT available with the Basic tier.
We also encourage our users to spread the word. A business directory is only as good as its listings and user base. Consider ‘buying black first’, and use our directory as your first port of call if looking for a product or service provider.
Black2Business is open to recieve any cross-promotional and sponsorship opportunities from organisations who share in common the interest of empowering the Black-British community. Please Contact Us with more information, and one of our team will get back to you as soon as possible.
The 100 Black Men of London is a community-based charity led by committed Black Men and also supported by Black Women, delivering Programmes focused on
The organisation has been serving our community since 2001, and have positively impacted thousands of lives through their good work.
This platform is developed and promoted collaboratively with the 100BMoL and it’s members. All proceeds generated from listing fees are donated to the organisation in the continued interest of serving the Black Community.
Learn More about the 100 Black Men of London.
