Deliver Sharper Trade Insights. Charge More.

Home › Who We Serve › Trade Consultants

The trade-data backbone for advisory firms

Trade consultants live or die by the quality of their evidence. Whether you are scoping a market-entry strategy for a Korean appliance maker, sizing the European demand for an Indian agro-chemical, building a competitor map for a Saudi M&A target, or stress-testing a private-equity firm’s tariff-exposure thesis, the answer always lives in customs declarations. ShipScout is where consultants pull those declarations on demand, in any country, at any HS-code resolution, refreshed on a 72-hour cycle.

Our records are reconstructed from primary government sources: US Customs CBP, EU Eurostat, Brazilian RFB, Mexican SAT, Argentine AFIP, Vietnamese Customs, and 200+ port and customs authorities globally. India trade flows are delivered via licensed mirror sources. Every figure you cite to a client is traceable back to a filed declaration, not to a survey or a vendor estimate.

Five consulting workflows ShipScout shortens from weeks to hours

1. Market sizing. Quantify total imports of any HS code into any country, by year, by source, with port-level granularity. Bottom-up from real shipments, not top-down extrapolations.
2. Competitor mapping. Build the supply-side and demand-side competitor list for any product-country pairing in under an hour.
3. Counterpart due diligence. Validate a target’s claimed export volume, customer concentration, and supplier dependency from independent customs data, so red flags show up early in buy-side work.
4. Tariff & sanctions exposure analysis. Map a portfolio company’s shipment history against pending tariff lines and sanctions to quantify P&L risk.
5. Market-entry validation. Confirm that demand exists at the price point a client wants to enter, with supplier mix, channel structure, and seasonal patterns drawn from real trade.

Why advisory firms switch from other providers

Other providers price aggressively for multi-seat consulting teams, price per-seat in the thousands, and contractually restrict how their data appears in client deliverables. They show flat tables with no analytical layer. ShipScout offers a flat per-seat plan that includes white-label-ready exports and explicit usage rights for client deliverables.

How consulting firms use ShipScout

Three real consulting use cases

1. Boutique market-entry consultancy advising a German auto-parts manufacturer

Sized the Indian aftermarket import demand for HS 8708 (auto parts) at ₹47,800 crore annually, mapped the top 50 importers by volume, and identified the three port clusters absorbing 78% of inflows, in 11 hours total. Previous identical engagement using legacy data took three analysts six weeks.

2. M&A advisor doing buy-side due diligence on a Vietnamese textile target

The target claimed 60% of revenue from US buyers. ShipScout’s customs reconstruction showed actual US shipment volume was 38%, with growing concentration to a single distributor, which the advisor used to renegotiate the deal terms. Saved the client an estimated $8M in inflated valuation.

3. Trade-policy advisory firm modelling US tariff scenarios

Built a portfolio-wide model of three PE clients’ aggregate exposure to a proposed Section 301 tariff on HS chapters 84 and 85 from China. Sourced the underlying shipment-level data from ShipScout, ran scenarios, and delivered an executive briefing within 48 hours of the announcement.

Every consulting plan includes

• Multi-seat licensing with team-level dashboards and project workspaces
• Bulk Excel and CSV exports with explicit usage rights for client deliverables
• API access for analyst workflows and proprietary models
• White-label-ready chart and table exports
• 150+ country customs coverage sourced from primary government data
• Counterpart verification dashboards for due-diligence workflows
• Trade-policy news feed on tariffs, sanctions, FTAs, and quota changes
• Dedicated client-success manager on enterprise plans