Trade Data Solutions for Exporters, Importers and Freight Teams
Whether you sell across borders, source from them, or move goods between them, the same customs records answer different questions. Here is how each team uses EximDataX in the first 30 days — the week it changes, the results they report, and the objection each role raises before they start. For the mechanics of each capability, see Features.
Find the buyers who already buy your category. This quarter.
Skip the cold pitches to importers who never buy your category. EximDataX hands you the named buyer list in 30 minutes.
Buyer discovery
Filter shipments by HS code and target market. Every row is a real importer with name, port, frequency, and shipment value.
Competitor displacement
See exactly which suppliers your target buyers currently use. If you can match their price + lead time, you have a switching pitch.
Price benchmarking
Per-unit median, p10, p90 by market. Know where your price sits before the buyer tells you.
Pre-call research
Open a buyer profile, see their last 12 months of shipments, their suppliers, their seasonality. Call them with context.
Outcomes our customers report
- Cut prospecting time from 30 days to one afternoon.
- Open conversations with the FOB number the buyer already pays.
- Stop pitching commodities to buyers who only source specialty.
What a typical week looks like
You pull every importer that bought your HS code into Germany, Poland and the Netherlands last quarter. Sixty-odd companies. You keep the eighteen that bought more than once.
Two of the eighteen changed supplier in the last six months. Those go to the top of the call list: a buyer who has switched once will switch again.
Three quotes go out, each priced against what that buyer’s current supplier actually charged at the border — not against your old list price.
I am new to exporting. Is this still useful?
Arguably more useful, because you have no account list to defend. The records answer the first question a new exporter has, where demand for your product already exists, with evidence instead of opinion. What it will not do is handle your documentation, certification or freight — it tells you who to sell to, not how to ship it.
My rivals undercut me. Does the buyer not simply take the lowest price?
Sometimes. But the price band on a lane is usually wider than exporters assume, and the same buyer often pays very different unit prices to different suppliers inside one quarter. Seeing that spread tells you whether you are genuinely out of the market or merely out of one buyer’s range — and if you really are out of the market, that is worth knowing before you spend a quarter quoting into it.
Find better suppliers. Pay what your competitors pay.
If you are buying from one origin because someone introduced you to a supplier in 2018, EximDataX shows you the 40 suppliers you have never heard of who ship the same category to your competitors.
Supplier discovery
Pull the list of every supplier shipping your HS code to your market. Sort by shipment count, value, recency.
Mirror-market discovery
Want suppliers from a country we don't license directly? We derive them from mirror markets: every country that exports to your target surfaces named suppliers. 184 additional countries reachable this way.
Price floor benchmarking
See the lowest p10 unit price across the market. That is your negotiation floor.
Switching risk research
Pull the named buyers your candidate supplier already serves. Cross-reference for references. Verify capacity.
Outcomes our customers report
- Discover 5–20 supplier alternatives within an hour of the demo.
- Reduce landed cost by 4–12% in renegotiations using p10 evidence.
- De-risk supply chains by knowing every active supplier, not just yours.
What a typical week looks like
You open the supplier list for your category. Most of the names on it have never once sent you a quote.
You weigh each candidate by its shipping record. A factory that ships forty times a year to eight buyers is a different risk from one that ships twice.
You take the bottom of the price band into the renewal call with your incumbent. Either the price moves, or you already hold three alternates who run this lane every month.
I already have a supplier I trust. Why would I look for another?
Two reasons, neither of them disloyalty. Single-sourcing is a risk position: one factory fire, one export restriction, one dispute, and your line stops. And you cannot tell whether your price is good until you see what the same goods cost other buyers at the border. Most importers who run this exercise stay with their supplier. They just renew on better terms.
Can I find suppliers in countries that do not publish customs data?
Often, yes — from the other side of the shipment, through the mirror-market discovery described above. That derivation is a platform capability rather than a workaround; it is described under Mirror intelligence on the Features page.
Map every trade lane. Pitch the shippers who actually ship.
Build target lists for your freight forwarding sales team in hours, not weeks.
Lane intelligence
Volume, frequency, and seasonality of any HS-code corridor between two ports.
Shipper targeting
Identify the named exporters/importers who would buy your container space. Sort by shipment count + port match.
Carrier benchmarking
Cross-reference which carriers move the lanes you sell.
Customs documentation
Pull real bills-of-lading and customs declarations to build accurate freight quotes.
Outcomes our customers report
- Build a 500-account freight pipeline in a single afternoon.
- Show prospects you understand their existing volume before pitching.
- Find white-space lanes competitors have not noticed.
What a typical week looks like
You take one corridor — Nhava Sheva to Jebel Ali, say — and pull who actually moved boxes on it last quarter, by volume and by frequency.
You cut everyone shipping less than monthly. What is left is a call list where every account has provable, repeating volume you can quote against.
The pitch meeting starts at “here is what we would do differently”, not “tell me about your business”.
We already know our lanes. What is new here?
Your lanes, yes. Your prospects’ lanes, probably not. The value is not the corridor you already service — it is the shippers on it whose accounts currently sit with somebody else. Knowing a lane is not the same as holding the list of companies moving boxes on it this month.
Is this good enough to pitch from, or is it directory data?
Yes: the volume you quote against is what was filed at the border, not what a marketing list claims. Some markets restrict the trader name by law, and those rows stay labelled as restricted instead of being padded out. Pitch from what is named; treat the rest as volume context.
Trade data solutions by industry: what customs records show
A trade data solution is only as useful as the record underneath it. Here each row is a shipment-level import or export entry taken from official customs sources. It is a filing, not a profile someone wrote.
Industry is defined by the HS code. Search a code and the same records serve a textile exporter, a machinery importer or a chemicals forwarder: trader names, ports, shipment value, carrier and the customs declaration itself, depending on the market.
Coverage is 43 direct customs feeds plus 184 mirror-derived countries, with buyer and supplier names in 38 of the 43 direct markets. Most markets refresh weekly and some refresh daily, so you can judge how recent the picture is.
How customs trade data helps discover new export markets by HS code
The role of import export data for an exporter starts before the first call. Search your HS code and see which countries already import the product. Rank them by volume. A market with steady imports has proven demand, so you do not have to guess.
Next, look inside each shortlisted market for repeat buyers, as the exporter week above shows. A long country list becomes a short, ordered list of accounts worth contacting.
This is also how import export data drives successful global trade for a small team: fewer markets, chosen on evidence, each with named buyers to approach. To check whether your business is ready to export at all, take the Export readiness test.
Trade data for logistics companies: trade lanes, freight forwarders and supply chain risk
Freight forwarders read the same shipment records by corridor. Peaks and quiet months on a trade lane show when shippers need space and where capacity is thin.
Importers use the same lens for supply chain risk. Your own orders show one supplier; the shipment records show everyone else who ships your lane, which is what a backup source list is built from.
How to choose a trade data provider for import export teams
A fair test uses your own product: bring an HS code and a target market to a free demo. For a closer look at the record itself, read about customs shipment data. Whatever tool you test, put the same questions to it:
- Source: does it come from customs filings, or from a compiled directory?
- Names: are traders shown, and are restricted markets labelled honestly?
- Freshness: how often does each market update?
- Reach: can it cover countries that publish no customs data?
- Search: can you start from an HS code?
See what your buyers are buying.Then decide.
Everything we show you comes from official customs filings — records, not claims. 30 minutes. Your shipment. Your HS code. Real platform. If you don’t see something new about your market by the end of the call, we walk away. No follow-ups.