As an exporter, how do you find opportunities on the internet to export your products? First you can ask this question to AI systems, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, and you can get some reasonable starting points. You can also ask the question to Google, and you will probably get some sponsored results for company listings, as well as answers to similar questions on Quora and similar websites. So, it may be useful to use these search results as pointers for better understanding. In this article, however, we want to follow a very pragmatic way of answering this simple question: I export a product, how can I find importers of this product on the internet?
This is actually one of our main goals at iSupply.ai: to allow finding trade partners easily. Nonetheless, we will discuss here the broader picture of finding trade partners, and you will find other articles discussing in detail how to find specific information on the iSupply.ai platform.
Step 1 – Identify which countries import your product
The most obvious part is to know and understand your product. Let’s assume that you produce onions and you want to export them. The very first step is to know which countries import onions. This information is widely and easily available, so you can get statistics about import quantities for each country per year using statistical data from platforms such as ITC Trademap, UN Comtrade Database, World Bank’s Doing Business reports, and so forth. Be careful, however, that there are always changes from one year to the next in production and export/import figures, so try to always seek the most recent data.
Now, having some understanding about which countries import your product, you can have a better focus. This information can also help guide your strategy, in terms of which countries to target, based on how close the country is to your location, and hence the logistics costs are less.
Also, this can guide your search, so instead of a broad search for all importers of onions, you can search for “onion importers in Germany” or “importers of onions in the United States”, and so forth.
Step 2 – Narrow and widen your product classifications
On a conceptual level, almost anything can have broader or narrower classifications. Let’s look again at the onion example.
Onions can be “red onions”, “yellow onions”, “white onions” and so forth. These are subclassifications of “onions”. It might be the case that some importers specialize in only one of these, or focus more on a particular subclassification. So, it may be useful to also search for “red onion importers in X country”.
You may find other subclassifications, such as “fresh onions” or “dried onions” and similar.
On the other hand, onions are types of plants, vegetables, food, and agricultural products. There can be many other broader classifications. It also makes sense that many importers actually import a broad category of items, not just one item. So, you may also get good results when searching for things like “vegetable importers in X country”.
Step 3 – Use the language barrier to your advantage
As we have seen in our article “How to jump the language barrier in international trade”, you get different results for the same query, when you search in different languages. So, it is important to be able to search for importers of your product, in both English, and the language of the importing country. This way, you will have better quality results. For example, knowing that Germany is among the biggest importers of onions, you may want to search for importers by using the query in German “Zwiebel Importeure in Deutschland”.
You’ll see that the results are more focused than what you get when you search in English.
Step 4 – Identify product specific lists and directories
When searching Google, the results that appear are those pages with content that directly mtaches your search query. You may find in the search results some of the actual items you’re looking for (e.g. importing companies). You may also find articles, for example word press articles like this one you’re reading, containing lists of these items, as you can see in this example. Notice that these lists are harder to maintain and can quickly be outdated.
Another type of results are directories and domain-specific search engines. These can be quite useful, for example websites such as Europages, Trade India, Made in China, can provide you options to search businesses and products in a certain domain with a specific search criteria. You may find other domain specific directories, such as this directory for fire safety equipement. Notice that not all directories are free, and some have freemium models, while others are behind a paywall; meaning that you need to pay money to see the results.
The important thing to note here is that the results that you can find on any of the directories may not readily appear on Google. This is because Google does not “search” the contents of these directories. It only follows the links of pages.
Therefore, it will be useful to identify directories of relevance to you, whether geographically or in a certain product domain. Then you will need to make sure to also search these directories as they will yield different results than Google search.
