Deliver Sharper Trade Insights. Charge More.
ShipScout gives export-import consultants and advisory firms direct access to 11.3B+ customs records across 150+ countries. Source data your competitors cannot. Bill premium rates for it.
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 customs authorities across 150+ countries. 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
- 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.
- Competitor mapping. Build the supply-side and demand-side competitor list for any product-country pairing in under an hour.
- 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.
- Tariff & sanctions exposure analysis. Map a portfolio company’s shipment history against pending tariff lines and sanctions to quantify P&L risk.
- 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, charge a steep premium on every additional seat, 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.
Charge premium for evidence-grade insights
Clients pay 3-5× for a market-sizing slide that cites real customs records over one that cites “industry estimates”. ShipScout makes that citation a 30-second export instead of a six-week research project.
How consulting firms use ShipScout
Market sizing & entry studies
Quantify import volume by HS code, country, year, and source. Bottom-up evidence for go-to-market decisions, replacing slow custom-research-firm engagements.
M&A trade-exposure due diligence
Pull the target’s 24-month shipment history, customer concentration, supplier dependency, and tariff line exposure. Spot risks before signing the LOI.
White-label deliverables
Export findings as branded Excel, PDF, or chart-ready CSV. Embed ShipScout-derived analytics into client decks under your firm’s name.
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
The full trade picture your clients pay you to deliver.
A single overview surfaces market trends, buyer and supplier rankings and country flows, turning raw customs data into billable insight in minutes.
Build evidence-grade insights today
Join advisory firms using ShipScout to size markets, run due diligence, and deliver customs-grade citations in hours, not weeks.