How to choose a trade data provider

The eight questions

1. For this specific market, are the records declarations or bills of lading? Anyone near the source data knows. Anyone reselling will give a vague answer.
2. How do you handle the product-code problem? A good answer describes searching both codes and descriptions. A bad answer claims the code search is complete.
3. How current is this market? Ask for the date of the most recent record, not the update frequency. "Updated monthly" and "the latest record is from fourteen months ago" are both compatible with the same marketing claim.
4. Which markets do you not cover? A provider who cannot name their own gaps has not looked.
5. Can I see the fields before paying? A masked sample costs them nothing and tells you whether the data is worth anything.
6. Where does the contact data come from, and under what authorisation? "Scraped" and "licensed" are different answers with different risk to you.
7. What happens when a market stops publishing? Markets go dark. Ask what happens to your access and whether you are told.
8. Will you tell me if my market is not worth buying? The most useful answer a vendor can give is "not for your product". A provider who never says this is selling, not advising.

Red flags worth acting on

• Coverage claimed as a single global number with no per-country breakdown.
• Numbers that cannot be reconciled with the country's published statistics.
• No mention of data sources at all.
• A price that is dramatically below everyone else's — usually means a shared or stale dataset.

What we do, in the same terms

Fair to state our own position against the list above: we publish the data level and year range for every market we cover, including the ones where we hold nothing usable. We will tell you which markets have shipment detail and which have statistics only before you commit. And if your product is a poor fit for what the records contain, we say so on the call rather than after.

Where to go next