Global trade intelligence, made simple.

ImportLookup turns publicly disclosed U.S. customs bill-of-lading records into a fast, clean, searchable workspace — so a sourcing, sales or research team can find who imports what, from whom, and how often, without learning a new query language.

What we build

Trade data arrives messy. The same company is filed a dozen different ways, one shipment can be reported several times, and product fields are free text of wildly varying quality. Most of our work is the unglamorous part: normalizing filings into structured shipments, resolving company names into a single canonical profile, splitting multi-value HS strings into atomic codes, and collapsing duplicate filings into one observation.

What that buys is a number you can defend. When ImportLookup says a company was observed receiving 412 shipments, that is 412 canonical observations from filed records — not a row count, not an estimate, and not a projection.

What we will not do

  • Publish free-text product fields, which routinely contain personal contact details.
  • Change a provider-reported importer or supplier role to make a profile look tidier.
  • Present a modelled or inferred figure as an observed one.
  • Claim coverage we do not have. Indexed scope is stated on every intelligence surface.

From filed record to answer

  1. Normalize

    Bill-of-lading filings are parsed into structured shipments. Multi-value HS strings are split into atomic codes; nothing is padded, truncated or invented.

  2. Resolve & dedupe

    Company names are resolved to one canonical profile, and duplicate filings of the same shipment collapse into a single observation with the source count preserved.

  3. Search & analyse

    Query by company, supplier, product category or HS code. Results rank likely buyers above freight forwarders, and relationship analysis runs on top of the same records.

The data behind it

Stated plainly, including its limits. Coverage expands continuously; figures always describe what is currently indexed.

Source
U.S. import bill-of-lading records, obtained through a licensed trade-data provider.
Scope
Ocean import shipments arriving at U.S. ports.
Shipment counts
Deduplicated canonical observations, never raw provider row counts.
Company names
Normalized to one canonical profile per entity; the filed role is never changed.
Product labels
Derived from HS codes and HS descriptions. Free-text product fields are not published.
Not included
Air and land shipments, declared values, and any contact details of individuals.

Contact

Questions about coverage, pricing, data licensing or a partnership — write to us directly and a person will reply.

hello@importlookup.com

For account or billing questions, email from the address on the account so we can find it quickly.