Your product has a name. Customs uses a different one.

Ask someone what they sell and they will tell you: coffee grinders. Then they search a trade database for “coffee grinder” and find eleven companies, most of them irrelevant, and conclude the data is bad.

The data is fine. The problem is that nobody who fills in a customs form is trying to describe a product to a buyer. They are trying to satisfy a customs officer, a freight forwarder and an insurer, in a box with a character limit, under time pressure, at three in the morning.

What the paperwork actually says

A shipment of coffee grinders can arrive filed as any of these:

• ELECTRIC COFFEE MILL
• COFFEE GRINDER BURR TYPE 220V
• KITCHEN APPLIANCE PARTS
• HOUSEHOLD ELECTRICAL APPLIANCE
• MACHINE FOR GRINDING

Only one of those contains the phrase a seller would search. The rest describe the same crate.

This gets worse the more specialised the product is. A manufacturer of industrial vacuum lifters searches “vacuum lifter” and gets nothing, because the importer’s broker wrote LIFTING EQUIPMENT and moved on. Meanwhile a search for “vacuum” returns vacuum cleaners, vacuum flasks, vacuum packing machines and vacuum pumps, because the word does four unrelated jobs in English and customs paperwork does not disambiguate them.

Why HS codes do not rescue you

The usual answer is to stop searching text and use the Harmonised System code instead — the international numbering scheme for traded goods. It helps, and it is not enough.

HS codes are coarse. Chapter 85 is “electrical machinery and equipment”, which covers a phone charger and an industrial transformer with equal enthusiasm. Even at six digits, 8508.11 is “vacuum cleaners of a power not exceeding 1,500 W” — that is a robot vacuum, a canister vacuum, a wet-dry shop vac and a handheld car vacuum, four different markets with four different buyers.

Codes are also applied inconsistently, because the person choosing the code is usually optimising for the lowest duty rate rather than for descriptive accuracy. Two importers buying the identical product from the identical factory can file it under different chapters.

So HS codes give you a neighbourhood, not an address. You need both: the code to narrow the region, and the wording to find the street.

The practical method

If you are searching trade data by hand, this is the sequence that works:

1. Start with what the thing physically is, not what it is called. “Coffee grinder” is a product name. “Grinding” and “mill” are descriptions of a mechanism, and mechanisms are what appear in shipping manifests.

2. Search the term a broker would type at 3am. Shorter, blunter, more generic, all caps. LED LAMP before “LED lighting solutions”. HAND TOOL before “precision engineering instruments”.

3. Look at what your known competitors’ shipments are filed as. This is the highest-value step and almost nobody does it. Pick a company you know imports your product. Pull its shipment records. Read the actual goods descriptions. Those are the phrases to search — they are proven to return the buyers you want, because they already did.

4. Collect the variants, then search all of them. One phrase will not do it. A real product usually needs four to eight, and the overlap between their results is small.

5. Check the misses, not just the hits. If a company you know imports your product does not appear in your results, your phrase list is incomplete. Go and read how that company’s shipments are filed and add the wording you missed.

Why this matters more than the database you choose

Every trade data provider is selling substantially the same underlying records — US import filings are a public record. What differs is what sits between you and them.

If a platform makes you guess the search phrase, you will do the five steps above by hand, badly, for every product you sell, and you will conclude that there are 11 buyers for coffee grinders when there are considerably more. The work is not in having the records. It is in knowing that ELECTRIC COFFEE MILL and COFFEE GRINDER BURR TYPE are the same market.

Portaxo does this step for you: describe a product in plain language and it resolves it to the phrasing US customs records actually use, then searches all the variants at once. Try it free — 30 credits a month, no card.