Every ocean consignment arriving in the United States — named consignees, overseas shippers, products, container volumes and port pairs, updated monthly.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Consignee | The US company receiving the goods |
| Shipper | The overseas exporter sending them |
| Notify party | Third party named on the bill of lading |
| Product description | As declared on the manifest |
| HS code | Where declared on the filing |
| Container count and type | TEU, FEU and equipment detail |
| Weight | Gross weight of the consignment |
| Port of loading / discharge | Foreign origin port and US arrival port |
| Vessel and voyage | Carrier vessel and voyage identifier |
US import data is built from vessel bills of lading filed with US Customs. Each record names the consignee, the overseas shipper, the product, container counts, weight, and the port pair.
Yes, the US consignee is named unless the company has filed a confidentiality request with CBP.
Bill of lading data covers ocean freight. Air movements are represented in the statistical dataset.
Multi-year history is available, which is what makes trend and seasonality analysis possible.
United States import records are unusually rich because ocean manifest data is public and names both the shipper and the consignee. That combination — a large market, named counterparties on both sides, and detail down to container level — makes the US the single most tractable market for buyer discovery and competitor tracking, and it is why many trade-data projects are piloted there even when the eventual target market is somewhere else.
| Field | What it gives you | Caveat |
|---|---|---|
| Consignee | The named US buyer | May be a customs broker or an agent |
| Shipper | The named overseas supplier | May be a forwarder on a master bill |
| Notify party | Bank, broker or local representative | Often closer to the end user |
| Vessel and voyage | The sailing and its schedule | Transhipment may not be obvious |
| Container count and type | A usable volume proxy | Not a declared quantity |
| Port of lading and unlading | The lane | Unlading port is not always the destination |
| Product description | The goods in the shipper's words | Not an authoritative classification |
The consignee is the party the goods were shipped to, which is frequently but not always the buyer. Large importers use customs brokers, third-party logistics providers and distribution subsidiaries, all of which can appear in the field. Two checks resolve most of it: look at the product breadth under the name — a broker will show implausible variety — and look at the notify party, which is often the party with the commercial interest.
Ocean manifest data is a carriage document, not a customs declaration. It does not carry an authoritative tariff classification, it does not carry a declared customs value, and it therefore cannot support duty or price benchmarking on its own. For those questions the manifest has to be read alongside declaration-derived data, which is why the two datasets are complements rather than substitutes.
Ocean manifest coverage is the strongest part of US import data. Air freight moves on air waybills, and coverage there is thinner — worth knowing before you conclude a supplier has stopped shipping.
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.
Ocean manifest records are public and name both shipper and consignee, which makes buyer discovery and competitor tracking more tractable than in most markets.
Not always. Customs brokers, logistics providers and distribution subsidiaries all appear in the field. Check product breadth under the name and look at the notify party.
No. It is a carriage document, so it carries parties, vessel, container and ports but not an authoritative classification or customs value.
Container count and gross weight give a usable proxy, and together they indicate density, which distinguishes heavy low-value cargo from light high-value cargo.
Coverage of air movements is thinner than ocean. A supplier that appears to have stopped shipping may simply have moved to air.