General

When we use customs data, we sometimes see some information on the bill of lading or manifest, and the receiver is N/A or the name of the shipping company. You may wonder why the real importer is not directly displayed?

First of all, we should know that some importers do not want to disclose the names of their Chinese suppliers. For many importers, the Chinese supply chain they have established is their main competitive advantage. It takes a lot of time and energy to establish a stable and good supplier network, even a high trial and error cost. For many importers, establishing a stable supply chain in China or other Asian countries is their main competitive advantage.

However, in the United States, the names of Shipper and Consignee are public information. These information can be obtained through more and more charging services of customs data services. Many of these expensive services, such as Import Genius and Panjiva, make it easy for some American counterparts to find out who the suppliers of their specific competitors are! You can inquire about the supply price and apply some new designs and molds.

Therefore, some importers use some strategies to hide the Consignee and Shipper information. Specific methods include:

1、 Avoid leaving company name on the bill of lading or manifest

The most common method used by foreign customers is to order bill of lading.

Use "to order of [our free forwarder]" in the signee of the bill of lading to avoid using the name and contact information of your company.

2、 Establish a company in Hong Kong and reissue the bill of lading

If someone searches in the customs data, this strategy can hide the real supplier. My college classmate is an old American customer. They are professional importers, and they have a Hong Kong company. The American importer can exchange the shipping documents in Hong Kong. He can ask his designated freight forwarder to reissue the bill of lading and make the Invoice, Packing List, etc. In this way, the shipper on the bill of lading becomes a Hong Kong company, not a mainland Chinese supplier.

Hong Kong is a famous place of registration for offshore companies, with highly active financial and trade activities. The establishment of a Hong Kong company is not only fast and costly, but also many accounting companies can register and manage documents on their behalf. At present, the costs and obstacles for domestic enterprises to register offshore companies have become higher and higher, but for foreign customers, there are basically no obstacles.

3、 Foreign trade companies with foreign capital or joint venture registered in the mainland

Foreign importers register foreign or joint-venture foreign trade companies in China, especially some domestic free trade zones. Such as Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangdong, Fujian, Shenzhen Qianhai, etc. Many foreign companies have also come to register in these free trade zones and obtained export rights through legal and compliance procedures.

These foreign enterprises and joint venture companies will employ experienced documentary and export specialists to purchase goods from domestic factories and export declaration in the name of their own domestic companies. The bill of lading and packing list show the information directly from domestic companies to foreign companies, and some will also be directly sent to the final foreign customers. The name of the supplier's factory will not appear on any customs data document.

4、 Set up a subsidiary for import

There is a Canadian customer who uses company name A on the bill of lading. When I went to look up the information, I found that there is very little information about company A online, and only company registration information can be found. Following the company registrant in the company registration information, I used Google and other tools to find another company B, and found that the boss of company B was the same person as the boss of company A.

So I spent some time and energy looking for the names of the purchasing-related personnel of company B, and called Cold call. Although Buyer was not there, I contacted an Executive Assistant of company B.

I talked on the phone for 5 minutes, asked her some questions, and the other party told me some information. Later, I followed up an email of follow up, transferred to purchasing and the purchasing also replied.

Later, we learned that they imported products with the company A's title and contact information.

5、 Apply to the United States Customs for confidentiality request

According to the U.S. Customs regulations, the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. 552 Revision) provides access to information and records open and maintained by the federal government. “

The United States Customs and Border Protection Agency is responsible for publicly providing AMS list data. However, American companies also have the right to put forward "Government Confidentiality Request" to protect the company's information privacy.

Any importer who needs to apply for company information protection can apply for information protection to the United States Customs and Border Protection Bureau through the email VesselManifestConfidentiality cbp.dhs.gov. The application processing time is relatively long, and the waiting time for review and approval usually takes 60-90 days.

The above are five main reasons or strategies adopted by foreign importers.

When we use customs data to develop customers, we must look at these issues rationally. Customs data only provides you with real import trade records, which is suitable for market analysis, product analysis, peer analysis and customer analysis for better development. For example, you can get a high-quality inquiry from the United States with TopEasy. In the past, we looked at the website to understand the customer. Now we can check the customer's import and export records, which suppliers we have cooperated with, and how about the purchase volume, strength, and price, so as to better convert customers.

But if you want to find out a batch of company names with customs data, then go to the mailbox. For more than ten years, customs data have been hampered by the lack of contact information, which has proved that this direction is wrong. No one will be silly to write the contact information on the customs declaration form, for fear that the peers do not know.

The correct direction of using customs data should be to get customers first. For example, you have obtained an inquiry, or use Turing to search the customer's name, mailbox, and website, and then match the customs data to see if there are import and export records, and analyze the customer's quality and import strength. This direction is very smooth. In addition, Turing Search has its own trade intelligence function, which automatically annotates the imported trademarks, so that customers can develop accurately one-to-one.

To sum up, if you have no customers but only customs data, your customers are basically zero. It looks like hundreds of thousands of data, but in fact you have nothing. But if you already have customers, or Turing searches for customers accurately, and analyzes customers with customs data, your conversion rate will be greatly improved.