When the Red Sea closes, the BOM doubles, or sanctions land overnight, procurement teams need an alternative supplier in 48 hours, not six months. ShipScout turns 11.3B+ customs records into a live alternative-sourcing engine.
Corporate procurement runs on three questions: who else makes this part, what does the market actually pay, and can the supplier deliver the volume we need? Internal ERPs answer none of them. Industry directories answer the first poorly. ShipScout answers all three in minutes, by reading the customs declarations of every shipment that crossed a border.
The 2020s have rewritten procurement risk. The Red Sea shipping crisis added 14-21 days to Asia-Europe lanes. The China+1 strategy reshaped electronics, textiles, and automotive sourcing. Russia sanctions cut off entire commodity classes overnight. Section 301 tariffs made Chinese imports 25% more expensive for US buyers. Mexico, Vietnam and India picked up the friend-shoring work, though only for teams who could find suppliers there quickly.
ShipScout was built for exactly this environment. Pull data from US Customs CBP, EU Eurostat, and 80+ national port authorities, with India trade flows delivered via licensed mirror sources, layered on top of an HS-code search engine, and procurement teams can answer "who else exports this from a non-China origin?" in under five minutes.
When Houthi attacks closed the Bab el-Mandeb strait, Asia-Europe ocean freight had to detour around the Cape of Good Hope. Suddenly every Asian supplier serving European procurement had a 14-day delivery slip. ShipScout users searched their HS codes filtered by destination = EU, origin in (Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt), and surfaced ready alternative suppliers already shipping into Europe via the Mediterranean. Weeks of risk eliminated in one afternoon.
The most-asked procurement question of 2026: "If China doubled tariffs tomorrow, who's our backup?" ShipScout's HS-code search by origin country gives a category manager a ranked list of Vietnamese, Indian, Indonesian, Malaysian and Mexican exporters of the same SKU, sorted by export volume, so real factory capacity is easy to tell from a five-person trading desk.
EU procurement teams that had been buying Russian fertilizer, sunflower oil, or steel had 48 hours to find replacement origins. A reverse-flow search ("every country exporting urea to the EU at scale") pulled up Algerian, Egyptian and Saudi exporters with verified shipment volumes, without a three-month consulting engagement.
Most procurement teams negotiate blind. They get a quote from their incumbent supplier, request two or three alternatives and pick the lowest, with no idea whether that number sits above or below the market. ShipScout fixes this with unit-price benchmarking. For any HS code, see the average CIF/FOB price paid by every importer into your country last quarter. If your incumbent is charging $4.20/kg and the market median is $3.10/kg, you have a $1.10/kg negotiating position, backed by customs declarations the supplier can't argue with.
The classic procurement failure: signing with a supplier that promises 50,000 units/month but has never shipped more than 8,000. ShipScout shows the real export volume of any supplier: annual tonnage, monthly cadence, customer roster and the container sizes they usually book. If a Vietnamese factory's largest historical month was $200K in exports, they're not safely going to fulfill your $2M PO. The data tells you before the contract does.
Single-supplier-of-failure analysis. Identify which BOM items have only one viable origin country.
Compare your unit costs against the market median CIF price for any HS code, by country.
Pre-built shortlists of backup suppliers for tariff, sanction, and freight-disruption scenarios.
Generate ranked supplier longlists by HS code, origin country, and shipment volume in minutes.
Check a supplier's real annual export tonnage rather than taking the sales pitch on trust.
Quick reroute suppliers out of sanctioned, tariffed, or freight-disrupted origins.
Other providers start at $25K and climb past $80K annually. ShipScout does the same supplier discovery and unit-price benchmarking from $1,200 a year, with CRM and contact intelligence included. See pricing →
Every supplier record on ShipScout maps back to actual customs filings. India trade flows are delivered via licensed mirror sources. US records draw on CBP's AMS waterborne manifests and ACE land/air entries. EU reconciles against Eurostat Comext intra-EU and extra-EU trade statistics. APAC, LATAM, and Africa pull from national customs declarations and port-authority registries. For procurement teams who need defensible data for category-strategy memos and board presentations, this provenance matters.
Procurement teams from electronics OEMs, food manufacturers, automotive Tier 1s, and pharma sourcing groups use ShipScout daily for category mapping, RFP supplier discovery, supplier-risk scoring, and contract-renewal benchmarking. The 23% average cost-reduction figure is the median customer outcome reported across the first year of ShipScout deployment.
Discover every verified manufacturer of a part by HS code, ranked by volume and country, so a defensible second-source shortlist takes minutes.
Join hundreds of exporters and importers already using ShipScout to find suppliers, track competitors, and discover new markets.