Coverage, sourcing, freshness, formats and access — the questions we are asked most.
The shipment-level customs record created when goods cross a border, naming the importer, exporter, HS code, product, quantity, declared value and ports.
200+ countries, with shipment-level detail for the major trading markets and statistical coverage for the remainder.
Official customs filings, bills of lading and port manifests obtained as public records in the jurisdictions we cover.
Monthly for most markets; 45 to 60 days for a small number of customs authorities that publish on a slower cycle.
Yes, from 2-digit chapter through to the 8 or 10-digit national tariff line, or by product keyword if you do not know the code.
Yes, wherever the customs authority publishes them. A small number of jurisdictions allow companies to request confidentiality.
Declared unit and total values are included wherever published, which covers the large majority of our markets.
Excel and CSV on every plan. API access and scheduled reports on Enterprise.
We provide a free demo report on your own product or HS code so you can judge the data before subscribing.
Directories list companies that registered themselves. We list companies that actually shipped, with the dates and volumes to prove it.
Yes — follow a named importer or exporter and see their shipments, partners, products and volumes over time.
Yes, on the Enterprise plan, with scheduled delivery options.
Two conventions run through every page and knowing them makes the rest easier. First, aggregate statistics and shipment records are different datasets and are never mixed: the country, chapter and industry tables are official figures reported to UN Comtrade, which establish market structure and never name a company; shipment records are filed with national customs authorities and are what a buyer or supplier list is built from. Second, every table shows the period it covers and the source it came from, because a figure without those is not evidence.
| If you want to… | Start at | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Find buyers for a product | The HS chapter, then import records | Demand is classified before it is commercial |
| Check a supplier | The export record for that company | History is behavioural, not declarative |
| Size a market | The country page | Reported totals establish structure first |
| Benchmark a price | Declared unit values on a tight line | Only a controlled comparison survives scrutiny |
| Understand an industry | The industry hub | An industry spans several chapters |
| Find an Indian counterparty | The location pages | Clearance point is the geographic signal |
Almost every wrong conclusion drawn from trade data is one of three things. Reading the incomplete tail of a series as a decline, when authorities publish on a lag and the last periods are still filling in. Reading a value movement as a demand movement, when declared value can move because volume moved, because price moved, or because the mix inside a tariff line changed. And treating a counterparty count as meaningful when the underlying names have not been resolved, which makes concentrated markets look fragmented.
If you want to know where coverage is thin, what the lag is in your market, or how company names were matched, ask. Those answers are more useful than any headline figure.
Can trade data tell me the market size? Only where imports are effectively the whole market — otherwise it measures the traded portion, which is a different quantity. Can it give me contact details? It names companies where the jurisdiction publishes them; contacts come from ordinary business research afterwards. Is it real time? No, and nobody’s is — the lag is created upstream by filing and compilation. Will it tell me what my competitor pays? It shows declared unit values, which are assessable values rather than invoices, and that is a strong prior rather than a price.
The pattern in all of those answers is the same. Customs data is unusually reliable about a narrow set of things and silent about everything else, and the practical skill is knowing which question you are asking before you go looking for an answer.
Trade data rewards a short, boring discipline far more than it rewards technique. Four steps cover most of it, and skipping any one of them is where the confident wrong conclusions come from. Fix the classification first, because every filter, every duty figure and every price comparison downstream is keyed to the tariff line and inherits any error in it. Then read at least three years, so that seasonality and trend can be told apart rather than conflated. Then exclude the most recent one or two periods, which are still filling in as late filings arrive. Then separate value from volume, because a value movement can be price, quantity or a change of mix inside the line, and those point in different directions.
| Step | What it prevents | Cost of skipping it |
|---|---|---|
| Confirm the tariff line | Filtering the wrong product | Every downstream figure is wrong by an unknown amount |
| Read three years | Mistaking a season for a trend | Strategy built on a cyclical high or low |
| Drop the incomplete tail | Reading reporting lag as decline | Writing off buyers who never stopped buying |
| Separate value from volume | Reading price as demand | Investing against a movement that was not demand |
| Check the counterparty | Acting on an unverified name | Credit or capacity committed to a company with no history |
| Record the period and source | Unrepeatable analysis | Figures nobody can reconcile three months later |
The material here is one layer of a set that is meant to be used together. The country pages establish the shape of a market from official reported figures. The HS chapter pages take a single classification down to product level. The industry hubs group the chapters that make up a real industry and sum them, because almost no industry is one chapter. The India location pages read the national record as places, using the clearance point as a geographic signal. And the trade role pages take one job at a time — building an importer list, checking an exporter, reading a lane — and set out the signals that matter for it.
Reported totals, partner markets and chapter breakdown for 99 markets.
Learn more ›All 98 chapters, each with the markets that trade it.
Learn more ›Thirty-eight industries, each summed across the chapters it spans.
Learn more ›Seventy-nine trading places, their gateways and their clusters.
Learn more ›The same record read as a buyer list, a supplier check or a lane analysis.
Learn more ›Classification, documentation, pricing, sourcing and compliance in practice.
Learn more ›Customs records cover goods that physically crossed a border and were declared to an authority. They do not cover services. They do not cover domestic trade, so a business selling mainly inside its own market will look far smaller here than it is. They carry no margin, no contract terms, no payment behaviour and no intent. Coverage of counterparty names varies by jurisdiction and is not universal, data arrives on a lag, and published periods are revised as corrections come in.
None of that reduces what the record is good for, and stating it plainly is what makes the rest credible. Used within its limits, customs data is one of the very few commercial sources where the underlying event actually happened, was documented at the time, and was documented under legal obligation rather than for promotional purposes. That is a rare property, and it is worth not overselling.
Before relying on any trade dataset — ours or anyone else's — ask which markets are covered at which depth, what the lag is in each, how company names were matched, and what happens to a historical series across an HS revision. The answers tell you more than any headline figure.