In today's competitive international market, every business that sells across borders eventually asks the same question: where can I find export data? Whether you are an exporter researching a new market, an importer evaluating suppliers, or a logistics company tracking trade flows, knowing where to look up export and import statistics is the first step toward making decisions based on facts rather than guesswork.
This guide explains where export data actually comes from, the main places you can look it up — both free and commercial — and how to choose the right source for your needs.
Before searching, it helps to be precise about what kind of data you are looking for. "Export data" can mean several different things, and each is found in a different place:
Macro trade statistics — country-level totals, such as how much a country exported in a given year or month, usually broken down by product category or partner country.
Product-level trade flows — how much of a specific HS code was exported between two countries over a period of time.
Shipment-level records — individual customs declarations that name the exporter, the importer, the quantity, value, ports, and shipping dates.
Company-level activity — the trade behavior of a specific company, including who it ships to, what it ships, and how often.
Each type answers a different business question. Knowing which one you need will save you a lot of time.
The most authoritative export data comes directly from national customs authorities and statistical offices. Most of these sources are free, though they usually publish aggregated figures rather than shipment-level detail.
UN Comtrade is the largest global repository of official trade statistics, maintained by the United Nations. It covers more than 200 countries and territories and lets you retrieve import and export data by commodity code (HS or SITC), by reporter country, and by partner country.
It is best suited for macro-level analysis: comparing export volumes between countries, tracking long-term trends, and studying product categories over time.
The WTO's statistics portal publishes trade profiles for individual countries and regional trade data, useful for understanding a country's overall export structure and its main trading partners.
Many countries publish export data directly through their own government websites. Common examples include:
United States — the Census Bureau's Foreign Trade division and USA Trade Online
China — the General Administration of Customs (GACC) statistics portal
European Union — Eurostat's Comext database for intra-EU and extra-EU trade
India — the Directorate General of Commercial Intelligence and Statistics (DGCIS)
Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and others — national customs statistics portals
The level of detail, language, and update frequency vary widely from country to country. These are reliable sources, but the data is usually delayed and aggregated, and searching across multiple national portals is time-consuming.
Free, official export data is excellent for understanding the big picture, but it has clear limits. It is important to be honest about this so you can set the right expectations.
What you can typically get:
Total export value and quantity by country and year or month
Trade broken down by HS code or product category
Partner-country breakdowns
What you usually cannot get from free sources:
The names of individual importers or exporters
Contact information for buyers or suppliers
Shipment-level records with ports, dates, and carriers
Real-time or near-real-time activity
If your goal is market analysis or academic research, free sources are often enough. If your goal is to identify specific buyers or suppliers, you will need more detailed data.
For shipment-level and company-level export data, businesses typically turn to commercial trade-data platforms. These services aggregate customs records from multiple countries, standardize them, and make them searchable by company name, product, HS code, or country.
Commercial platforms generally provide:
Importer and exporter names
Product descriptions and HS codes
Shipment dates, quantities, and values
Ports and sometimes carrier information
This is the data that supports lead generation, supplier verification, and competitor analysis — the tasks that free statistics cannot handle.
There are a number of providers in this space, each with different country coverage, interface, and focus. When evaluating a platform, it is worth checking which countries' data it actually covers, how fresh the records are, and whether the fields you care about (such as buyer names) are available for your target market.
| Your Goal | Best Place to Look |
|---|---|
| Understand a country's overall export trends | UN Comtrade, WTO, national statistics offices |
| Study a product category's global trade flow | UN Comtrade, Eurostat Comext |
| Find specific buyers in a target market | Commercial trade-data platform with shipment-level records |
| Verify a supplier's export history | Commercial platform or company credit reports |
| Track a competitor's shipments | Commercial platform with company-level search |
A sensible workflow is to combine sources rather than rely on one alone:
Start broad. Use UN Comtrade or a national statistics portal to confirm which markets are growing and which product codes show strong demand.
Narrow down. Once you have identified a promising market and product, move to a commercial trade-data platform to look up actual buyers, suppliers, and shipment records.
Act. Use the company-level detail you find to build prospect lists, reach out to verified buyers, or vet suppliers before committing.
Free data tells you where the opportunity is; detailed data tells you who is behind it. Both have a role in a complete export strategy.
If you have reached the stage where you need shipment-level and company-level export data — for example, to find importers of a specific product, verify a supplier, or study a competitor — this is where a platform like Big Trade Data (BTD China) can help. BTD China is a global trade intelligence platform that brings together customs and trade records from more than 230 countries and regions, and makes them searchable by company, product, HS code, and country.
It is worth emphasizing what BTD China is and is not: it is a data and analysis tool for international trade, not a substitute for official statistics. It complements the free sources above by offering the detail that government portals generally do not publish — such as buyer and supplier names and shipment-level records — for businesses that are ready to act on the data rather than just study it.
As with any platform, the right way to evaluate it is to check whether its country coverage and data fields match your specific market and goals. What matters is finding the source that answers your actual question.
"Where to find export data" has more than one answer, because the right source depends on what you need the data for. Official sources like UN Comtrade and national customs portals give you reliable, free macro-level statistics. Commercial trade-data platforms give you the detailed, shipment-level and company-level records that drive lead generation, supplier verification, and competitor analysis.
The practical approach is not to pick one or the other, but to use them together: free data to spot the opportunity, and detailed data to act on it. Once you are clear on the question you are trying to answer, finding the right export data becomes a straightforward step rather than a barrier to doing business globally.
BTD Whatsapp
BTD Official Account
E-Mail:sales@btdchina.com
