Bill of lading data

Bill of lading data is built from sea-freight manifests: the documents that list what a vessel carries, who sent it and who receives it. Procurement teams use it to find suppliers and verify their export history, sales teams to find active importers, logistics providers to win freight business, and analysts to track sourcing shifts.

Typical fields

• Bill of lading number and arrival date
• Shipper, consignee and notify party
• Cargo description and inferred HS code
• Port of lading, port of unlading and place of receipt
• Carrier, vessel and voyage
• Container count, weight and marks

Sources and collection

The main public source is US Customs and Border Protection, whose vessel manifest data is available under 19 CFR 103.31. Importers and shippers can request confidential treatment of their names, so some records appear as confidential, and air cargo manifests are not published the same way. A few other countries publish manifest or declaration data under their own rules. Providers parse the raw feed, infer HS codes from free-text descriptions and resolve company names into entities.

Delivery and pricing

Bill of lading data is sold as a search platform subscription, daily or monthly files, or an API. Price usually depends on countries, history depth, number of users or records exported, and refresh frequency.

Before you buy

• Check the share of records with confidential shippers or consignees.
• Ask how HS codes are inferred from cargo descriptions and how accurate this is.
• Confirm how master and house bills are handled to avoid double counting.
• Check entity resolution of company names and addresses.
• Ask which countries beyond the US are included and on what legal basis.