Every shipment that enters the United States by sea generates a record. That record names the company receiving the goods, the company sending them, a description of what was inside, and the date. It is a public record, and it is the closest thing that exists to a list of companies that have proven they buy what you sell.
This is how to turn it into a list you can actually work.
Step 1: Find the wording, not the product name
The single biggest reason a search returns nothing is that customs paperwork
does not use the words a seller uses. Your “coffee grinder” arrives filed as
ELECTRIC COFFEE MILL or KITCHEN APPLIANCE PARTS.
Start from a company you already know imports your product, read how its shipments are described, and search those phrases. We wrote about this at length in what customs calls your product.
Step 2: Throw out the companies that are not buyers
This is the step that separates a usable list from a spreadsheet of noise, and it is where most people give up.
The company named on a customs filing is the consignee — whoever the goods were shipped to. That is frequently not the buyer:
- Freight forwarders and customs brokers appear as consignee constantly. They will be at the top of your list by volume, because they receive everything for everybody. Names containing logistics, freight, cargo, forwarding or transport are the obvious ones; plenty are not obvious.
- Trading companies and importers of record buy to resell. Sometimes worth contacting, but they are not the end customer and they will not pay end customer prices.
- Retail giants import everything. Finding Costco in your results tells you nothing, because Costco is in everyone’s results.
The test that works: look at what proportion of a company’s imports are your product. A company where your category is 40% of its shipments is in your business. A company where it is 2% is a generalist who bought a pallet once.
Step 3: Rank by recency, not by size
A company that imported 8,000 shipments over fifteen years and nothing since 2023 is not a lead. A company that imported 60 shipments in the last twelve months is.
Sort by activity in the trailing year. Then look at the last shipment date. If the most recent record is more than about eighteen months old, the buying relationship has probably moved somewhere you cannot see — or the company has stopped importing that product entirely.
Step 4: Prefer the companies you can actually reach
This is the counterintuitive one, and it is where most exporters waste the most time.
The instinct is to go after the largest importers. But a large importer has an established supplier, a procurement department, an approved-vendor process and no reason to answer a cold email from an unknown factory. A small importer with a couple of hundred shipments a year often has a founder or a single buyer who reads their own inbox and is actively looking for a better price.
Sort your list by size band and work the small and mid-sized companies first. The reply rate is not slightly better. It is a different business.
Step 5: Verify the company before you write to it
Customs records give you a name and an address. They do not give you a website, and company names in the records are messy — abbreviated, misspelled, sometimes the name of a subsidiary nobody outside the company has heard of.
Before you spend effort on outreach, confirm:
- Which website is actually theirs. Searching the name will often return a similarly-named company in a different industry.
- That they still exist and still trade. Companies close.
- Who the right person is. For a small importer that is often the founder or a head of purchasing. For a mid-sized one it is a category buyer, and writing to the general enquiries address will not reach them.
Step 6: Write to them about the shipment, not about yourself
You know something almost no other cold email knows: what they import, roughly how much, how recently, and often from which country.
A first line that says “I saw you’re importing wet-dry vacuums from Vietnam” is a different email from “we are a leading manufacturer of quality vacuum cleaners”. One of those gets read.
Be careful with the detail, though. The records are public, but leading with volumes and supplier names can read as surveillance. Reference the category and the fact that they are active, not their entire purchasing history.
What this method cannot tell you
Being honest about the gaps, because a method that oversells itself wastes your time:
- It is US ocean imports. Air freight is largely absent, and other countries have their own regimes with their own coverage.
- Some shippers are confidential. A company can file to have its records withheld, and many large ones do. Their absence from your results does not mean they do not import.
- It tells you what was shipped, not what was paid. Volume is a proxy for spend, not a measurement of it.
- It is historical. A record is evidence of a past purchase, not a signal of present intent to switch supplier.
None of that stops the method working. It just means a name on the list is evidence, not a qualified opportunity — and treating it as the latter is how people burn a good data source on a bad outreach campaign.
Portaxo runs steps one through five automatically: describe a product, get ranked US importers with forwarders filtered out, size bands, shipment recency and a verified website for each. Start free — 30 credits a month, no card required.