Customs data's Secret: why there are only 31 trading countries

First, let's talk about where does the customs data come from?



When importing and exporting goods from various countries, they need to go through customs. The customs is responsible for recording the transaction data of the import and export goods. The generated data of the bills and customs is the customs data. Because the laws and regulations of different countries are different, the published data is different, and the customs data that you can use can be roughly divided into three categories:

The first type is the trade information that can be viewed for free on the local customs website of the trading country; the second type is to purchase customs data directly through the customs of the trading country; and the third type? It is purchased through data service providers to obtain customs data. Two of these problems often arise: the high cost of data and the authenticity of the data to be screened.

The data obtained directly through the customs channels of various countries is mainly based on the import declaration of local customs, and all transaction records of countries and target countries can be seen. Which countries are there?

The countries that have released real customs data are:
North America: United States, Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador
South America: Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Guatemala
Asia: Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Indonesia
Europe: Russia, UK, Ukraine
Africa: Ethiopia

Because customs data is first-hand data obtained directly from customs of various countries, the data is limited by various customs policies of local governments. Therefore, there are currently only 30 countries that are actually publicly available and have access to data. Not all countries disclose detailed customs data. Among them, the countries that allow the disclosure of customs data also have different contents of the open fields.

Here Foreign Trade State is about to ask: "Service providers who claim to have data for 200 countries, may I ask: Where does this data come from?"

The data for 200 countries generally includes the following three types of data:

One is customs data.
Each transaction record in the customs data is true, and the information content includes importers and exporters, products, quantities and prices.

One is statistical data.
Including backwash data in second-tier countries. Whether there are importers and exporters in the records of this type of data are affected by the field content of data sources in first-tier countries. If the fields are complete, like U.S. data, then the corresponding back-reasoning data has more field contents and more complete. If it is like the British data, then the back-reasoning content is relatively small, and the data is relatively incomplete.
Another category is the list of buyers. Buyer information is from 200 countries around the world. These are not transaction information, but only corporate information. We can't judge the real purchasing needs and strength of buyers from the buyers list, and we don't even know whether the buyers have purchased our similar products.

Based on the above data classification, you can roughly judge whether the customs data you purchased is real data that has not been processed. Be careful not to be confused by the directory of exhibitions provided by service providers or the lack of data from importers, thinking that buying data from 200 countries at low prices is still complacent for the company to save costs. In fact, the value provided by these data is very limited. There is no statistical data of importers, which can only be used for market analysis of the industry.