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The same customs record answers a different question depending on who is asking. These pages take one role at a time — the signals worth reading and how to work them.
A customs declaration does not know whether you are sourcing, selling, checking a counterparty or watching a rival. Each of those reads the same fields in a different order, and each has its own idea of what a good signal looks like.
Every company that has cleared a consignment under a given tariff line is, by definition, already buying that product.
Learn more ›The export side of the record is a supply map.
Learn more ›A customs record does not label a company a manufacturer.
Learn more ›Distributors show up in import records as steady, repeating buyers with a broad product mix in one category and a narrow set of origins.
Learn more ›Smaller exporters are under-represented in directories and over-represented in the customs record, because the record does not care how large a company is — only that it shipped.
Learn more ›Merchant exporters buy domestically and ship internationally without manufacturing.
Learn more ›The clearing agent named on a declaration is a practical signal, not an administrative detail.
Learn more ›The carrier, vessel and port pair on a bill of lading describe the lane: how the goods actually travelled, how long it took and roughly what it cost.
Learn more ›Most business directories list companies that chose to be listed.
Learn more ›Retail and marketplace importers behave differently from industrial buyers: sharper seasonality, broader SKU mix, and volumes that respond to promotions rather than to production plans.
Learn more ›A company appearing in the export record for the first time is a different proposition from one with a decade of history — for a buyer assessing risk, and for a service provider looking for customers at the moment they need help..
Learn more ›Once you can search by company name, competitive research stops being interpretation and becomes observation: which products they move, which origins they buy from, how volumes trend, and when something changes..
Learn more ›Datasets
Ocean manifest records — shipper, consignee, vessel, container count and the port pair for each movement. The other half of the story a customs declaration tells.
Learn more ›Bills of entry and shipping bills as filed with the national customs authority — the classification, the declared value and the duty basis for every consignment.
Learn more ›The same shipment record read by gateway — which ports carry which commodities, on which lanes, and what that implies for transit time and cost.
Learn more ›Declared value divided by declared quantity, compared across suppliers, origins and periods — the number that turns a negotiation into an argument from evidence.
Learn more ›The same records delivered into your own systems — scheduled extracts, bulk files, or a query endpoint your application calls directly.
Learn more ›One company's whole trade history in one view — the products it moves, the partners it moves them with, the volumes, and how consistent any of it has been.
Learn more ›A customs declaration does not know whether you are sourcing, selling, verifying a counterparty, tracking a rival, arranging freight or discharging a compliance obligation. Each of those reads the same fields in a different order and has a different idea of what a good signal looks like. An exporter cares about frequency and price band; a sourcing manager cares about destination spread and consistency; a compliance officer cares about routing and ownership. Same rows, different questions.
| Reader | First field they look at | What a good answer looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Exporter hunting buyers | Shipment frequency | Consignments in most months, over years |
| Importer checking a supplier | Destination spread | Several markets, including regulated ones |
| Category buyer | Declared unit value | A band tight enough to quote against |
| Competitive analyst | New origins and new chapters | A change at the edge of the baseline |
| Logistics planner | Port pair and carrier | A direct, frequent, high-volume lane |
| Compliance officer | Routing and counterparty | An order consistent with the buyer's history |
Whatever the question, four disciplines apply. Fix the classification before anything else, because every filter and figure depends on it. Read at least three years, so seasonality can be separated from trend. Exclude the most recent incomplete periods, because reading them as a decline is the commonest error in the field. And separate value from volume, because a value movement can be price, quantity or mix, and those lead to different decisions.
The pages below take one role at a time and set out the signals worth reading, the shortlist method, and the failure modes specific to that use. They are deliberately practical rather than promotional: the aim is that someone who has never used customs data can run a useful query the same day, and someone who has can find the specific check they have been skipping.
Shipment history is strong, dated, quantified evidence about what a counterparty actually does. It is not a sanctions screen, not a credit report, and not advice on your obligations.
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.
A view of the same customs record organised around one job — building an importer list, checking an exporter, separating manufacturers from merchants, reading a lane, tracking a competitor. Each sets out the signals that matter for that job.
If you are selling, start with importer lists. If you are buying, start with exporter lists and the manufacturer-versus-merchant check. Everything else builds on those two.
The method is on the page and free to use. Running it against live records for your own tariff line and market is what the demo and subscription are for.
No. It is strong supporting evidence about what a counterparty actually trades, but it is not a sanctions screen, a credit assessment or legal advice.