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. Now more and more enterprises have jumped out of the traditional thinking and way of acquiring customers, and choose customs data, one of the most valuable big data in the foreign trade industry, as an important channel for developing customers.

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

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 the data of the customs country.

At the same time, the buyer of the United States will also declare the import to the United States Customs, and the United States Customs will record the import information of the goods, which is called the data of the country of presentation.

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

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

However, because many people do not correctly grasp the use of customs data, they have not played their due role in practical work. Next, I would like to share with you the methods of developing foreign buyers using customs data from several angles, hoping to help you open your mind and get better on the road of foreign trade.

1、 Find directly

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

Here, we should pay attention to why is the HS code of the first 4-6 bits? Because we use foreign customs data, the code 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 countries may be different. In order to ensure the accuracy of the search data, we need to take the same number of digits.

2、 Peer lookup

Would you like to know which foreign buyers your peers are cooperating with?

By inputting the English name of the 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 its buyers.

Note: When entering the company name, it is recommended to remove the following words, for example: "HUIZHOU YUNXIN TECHNOLOGY CO LTD", you can enter "HUIZHOU YUNXIN TECHNOLOGY", if not, you can try to enter "HUIZHOU YUNXIN" again, and so on.

3、 Reverse lookup

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

You can use the back-check method. At present, many countries (the United States, India, Vietnam, Russia, Pakistan, etc.) have not only import data, but also export data. We can query the purchasing companies of EU countries through the export data of these countries. These importers are also potential high-quality customers.

4、 Analogy lookup

We know that looking for customers from customs data is actually equivalent 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 with the previous suppliers, it may not be so easy to develop.

At this time, we might as well expand our thinking. Carefully study the company nature of the purchaser in the customs data, so as to understand the overseas distribution mode and distribution channel of our products.

For example, you are a foreign trade enterprise that makes sunglasses. Through the customs data, you have studied the importers and 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 auto parts (4S stores), and even children's articles stores.

Having defined the customer group, we can carry out multi-dimensional development in combination with search engine, social media, Google Maps and other functions, further extend the value chain of customs data, and easily achieve the resource fission of target customers.