General

In the information age, the mining and application of big data has become the core competitiveness of enterprise development.

The foreign trade industry is no exception. Nowadays, more and more enterprises have jumped out of traditional customer acquisition thinking and methods, choosing customs data, one of the most valuable big data in the foreign trade industry, as an important channel for customer development.

What is customs data? As the name implies, it refers to various import and export statistical data generated by customs offices in various countries when performing their import and export trade statistics functions, including data from the country of bill of lading and customs document.

For example, if a bill of goods is exported from China to the United States under FOB terms, the Chinese seller will declare the export to the Chinese customs, and the Chinese customs will record the export information of the bill of goods, which is called customs country data.

At the same time, buyers in the United States will also declare their imports to the United States Customs, which will record the import information of this shipment, which is referred to as the country of presentation data.

The bill of lading country data can display the transaction fields of both parties, while the customs country data does not contain "exporter" information.

By viewing customs data, foreign trade enterprises can analyze target markets, gain insight into industry trends, monitor competitors, and quickly locate accurate buyers. This is one of the necessary tools for foreign trade enterprises to effectively explore overseas markets.

However, due to the fact that many people do not correctly grasp the use of customs data, they have not played their due role in practical work. Below, I would like to share with you the methods of using customs data to develop foreign buyers from several perspectives, hoping to help you open your mind and make progress on the road of foreign trade.

1、 Direct Find

Enter a product keyword or the first 4-6 digits of the HS code to search directly. For example, if you are making shoes, you can visually see the overall export situation of footwear products through a search, including destination countries, transaction times, buyers, suppliers, and so on.

Note here, why is it the first 4-6 bits of HS code? Because we use foreign customs data, the coding and data content are subject to foreign customs. Normally speaking, the top six countries in the world are the same, but the next 2-4 may be different for each country. To ensure the accuracy of the search data, we need to take the same number of digits.

2、 Peer Lookup

Want to know which foreign buyers your peers are working with?

By inputting the English name of a peer company, you can continuously track and analyze the export situation of the peer company, and master the basic information, procurement rules, and demand changes of their buyers.

3、 Reverse lookup

Due to the different customs policies of each country, the customs data allowed to be opened are also different. For example, EU countries do not open the details of bills of lading. What if foreign trade enterprises want to develop countries such as Germany, France, and Italy?

You can use the reverse lookup method. Currently, many countries (the United States, India, Vietnam, Russia, Pakistan, etc.) have not only import data, but also export data. Through the export data of these countries, we can query procurement companies in EU countries, and these importers are also potential high-quality customers.

4、 Analogy lookup

We know that finding customers from customs data is actually tantamount to prying orders from competitors. If the importer has no idea of changing suppliers for the time being, or if your advantages are not obvious compared to previous suppliers, then development may not be that easy.

At this point, we might as well expand our thinking. Carefully study the company nature of the purchaser in customs data to understand the overseas distribution model and channels of our products.

For example, you are a foreign trade enterprise that manufactures sunglasses. Through customs data, a study of importers has found that the importers of such products are not only traditional optical instrument retailers and wholesalers, but also many women's clothing distributors, jewelry dealers, suppliers of automotive parts (4S stores), and even children's products specialty stores.

With a clear customer base, we can conduct multi-dimensional development in combination with search engines, social media, Google Maps, and other functions, further extending the value chain of customs data, and easily achieving resource fission for target customers.