Bill of Lading - HEATHER HUGHES - ImportKey Import Trade Data

Every shipment entering or leaving the United States is required to pass through U.S Customs. Our shipment manifest data comes from the bill of lading for shipments. The shipment manifest data given to us comprises of all accessible data on the bill of lading.
Our software makes this data easily searchable and comprehensible, allowing you to make intelligent investment decisions for you or your company.

ImportKey offers 3 flexible plans to meet your business needs. Each plan includes company contact info, dedicated email support, downloadable search results, visual maps and company searches. The main difference between the plans is the number of searches per day as well as the amount of data you have access to.
The Startup plan is intended for clients who are hoping to get data on specific organizations.
The Business plan enables you to look through 2 year of shipment information while the Enterprise plan gives you access to more than 5 years of shipment information.

ImportKey matches the search keyword you used and outputs all the matching records. However, there are certain situations where you see multiple records with similar data.
1. There might be many house bills or simple bills attached to the Master BOL, and you are viewing all the records at the same time.
2. Shipment records are updating during Trade or when reached the ports. This creates a new record with the same information. We do not delete the shipment manifests which are updated.
3. The records also get duplicated with same BOL numbers, when a container has many LCL shipments with the same products. This can create multiple shipment records, with the same data.

We have built a robust search field, that gives accurate results. You can search for Products, Company name and address, BOL numbers, HS code, Port of lading, suppliers and buyers.

Actual Arrival date: The date the shipment was received at a US port
Cargo Description: Text field describing the product and goods shipped
Quantity: Number of items in the shipment
Weight: Weight of goods shipped (includes packaging)
BOL: The Master Bill of lading number
Consignee: The party that purchased the goods
Shipper: The party that shipped goods

According to US Customs data, a Company / Organization can petition the U.S. government to have their name and address and their overseas suppliers' names and addresses removed from bill of lading records. This is the reason why some consignee and shipper fields are blank. In many cases, we can get the company details in the cargo description fields.

You may upgrade or downgrade your account at any time. In the case of an upgrade we will refund your previous subscription on a prorata basis. In the case of a downgrade your subscription rate will be updated at the beginning of next monthly billing cycle.

ImportKey provides a tab for each supplier record which will include any listed phone numbers or email addresses included in the customs and trade data. However, often companies will not input their phone numbers or email information into the shipping record. Thus, alternative and often more effective methods for finding the suppliers' contact information is to search for the company's name and different variations of the company's name on Google and other search engines (e.g., Baidu). In addition, you can search the companies' address in Google as often that will pull up helpful information regarding contact details. If you still cannot find the contact information you can also hire a sourcing agent in the local country and provide them the address and company name and they should be able to put you in contact.

There are a few different reasons this may be happening. The most common reason is that often companies will import products under a different company name (subsidiary/sister company) than they sell them under. To address this there are a few different methods you can attempt including: 1) search for the company address instead of name; 2) check trade mark registrations, government filings and domain name registrations for alternative company names and addresses; 3) check company websites for corporate structure and any parent/sister/subsidiary companies. In addition, our data only covers sea freight and thus any air shipments or companies which ship exclusively by air will not show up in the search results. Furthermore, some exporters may use third party shipping or export agents to handle their sea freight exports and thus only the shipping company or agent name may show up on the shipping record instead of the actual exporter/supplier.