Import and export data records international trade in goods, either shipment by shipment or aggregated by product, country and period. Exporters use it to find buyers, importers to find and compare suppliers, analysts to size markets and track competitors, and researchers to study trade flows.
Typical fields
- Date or period and reporting country
- HS code and product description
- Importer and exporter names, where lawful
- Quantity, unit and weight
- Declared value (FOB or CIF) and currency
- Origin and destination countries, ports or customs office
- Transport mode
Sources and collection
Shipment-level data comes from documents some countries make public, such as US vessel manifests (available under 19 CFR 103.31, subject to confidentiality requests) and declaration files from several Latin American customs authorities. Aggregated statistics come from national statistics offices, Eurostat and UN Comtrade. HMRC publishes monthly lists of UK traders by commodity code without values. India restricts publication under section 135AA of the Customs Act, so named Indian shipment records are not accepted here.
Delivery and pricing
Data is sold as a search platform subscription, scheduled files or an API. Price is driven by the number of countries, history depth, whether party names are included and refresh frequency. One-off extracts for a single product or lane are common.
Before you buy
- Ask for the record type and legal source for every country.
- Check the update lag between shipment date and availability.
- Confirm the HS code level: 6-digit international or 8+ digit national.
- Ask how company names are cleaned and matched across years.
- Check how confidential or masked records are shown.
- Treat this as general information, not legal advice.