Friday, January 30, 2015

Buying Names of Importers and Exporter From USCustoms

One of my perennially popular posts relates to Importgenius, zepol, PIERS and other import export data mining services.  In essence the services buy some names of importers and exporters from USCustoms and repackage them for retail at a markup.  Their customers are people who believe that knowing who might be competitors, and with whom they do business might be of some use in international trade.  Delusional! They are looking for a shortcut but find a dead end.

Here is the rules on the raw data the services buy:

 http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2009-title19-vol1/pdf/CFR-2009-title19-vol1-sec103-31.pdf

And you can read ...

that (e) Availability of manifest data on CDROMS—(1) Availability. Manifest data acquired from the Automated Manifest System (AMS) is available to interested members of the public on CDROMS.
...
Requestsfor CD-ROMS must be in writingand submitted to: 
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 
National Finance Center, Collections Section, 
P.O. Box 68907, Indianapolis, Indiana 46268,

or  6026 Lakeside Blvd., Indianapolis,
Indiana46278. 

Requests must include acheck to cover the cost of the
CDROMS requested. Actual costs and other specific information should
be ascertained by contacting the Collections Section at (317) 614–4514.


Some questions I had that were answered:

Q:  I want to confirm as the AMS it only reports ocean going goods, not anything by rail or truck from canada or mexico, plus nothing by air.  Do I have that correct?

A. The AMS data is only ocean going vessels.

Q. Is there anything that tracks trade in services, such as say importing of radiology reviews from India to USA?

A. In regards to importing radiology reviews, that might be something a data mining company can do.  The data that is provided is just raw data without analysis.  This is done by the trade journals or data mining companies that purchase the data.

  The AMS data reports are ran daily, except on Sundays.  The cost for data is $100/day. You can either purchase a single days’ worth of data or purchase a subscription. Either way the price is the same ($100/day). Historical data is available too in most cases, depending on the dates.

Feel free to forward this by email to three of your friends. 


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

When can we expect your new book?

John Wiley Spiers said...

Sooner than last week...

John