If you make something and want to sell it abroad, the hard part is not shipping or paperwork. It is finding the person who actually buys your category, in a country that actually imports it. This is how that is done in 2026 — starting with the methods that cost nothing.
Written by AIBuilder Marketplace. We research tools rather than resell them. One of the paid options below is a partner of ours and that link earns us a commission; it is marked, it costs you nothing, and it sits at the bottom because that is where it belongs in the order you should try things.
Before you look for a buyer, find out where the demand is. The UN's Comtrade database and the ITC's Trade Map both publish import volumes by product code and country, free. Look up your HS code and you will see, in tonnes and dollars, which countries bought it last year and whether that number is rising or falling.
This step alone kills a lot of wasted effort. Exporters routinely chase the biggest economies when the actual growth is in a market they had not considered.
Almost every country funds an export agency that will introduce you to buyers for free or close to it — trade missions, matchmaking, buyer lists. In the Netherlands that is RVO, in the UK the Department for Business and Trade, in the US the Commercial Service. These are underused because they are unglamorous, not because they do not work.
Trade shows remain the highest-conversion route in most categories, and the attendee list is usually published in advance. You do not always need a stand: walking the floor with a list of names is cheaper and often more productive than exhibiting in your first year.
Alibaba, Made-in-China, IndiaMART and Europages will put you in front of volume, and also in front of price-driven enquiries and a fair amount of noise. They work best when your product has a clear spec and your margin can survive a competitive quote.
All of the above tell you which countries import your product. None of them tell you which companies do, or who currently supplies them, or how often they buy. That is the wall most exporters hit: you know Germany imports 40,000 tonnes of your category, and you still have no names.
The data that closes that gap exists. Customs authorities in many countries publish shipment-level records — who shipped what to whom, when, and in what quantity. Reading them directly is impractical; that is what trade intelligence platforms are for.
We cover several of these tools. The one we have a partnership with is Volza, and here is the honest version rather than the pitch.
What it does: searches shipment records across 200+ countries and returns the companies importing your product, with contact details, volumes and shipment frequency. That is the "who" that Comtrade and Trade Map cannot give you.
What it costs: from around $1,500 a year. Against Panjiva or ImportGenius, which have historically run $15,000 to $50,000 a year, that is a different league of pricing.
Two things we would want to know before paying: downloads run on a point system where the cost varies by market — a US or India shipment is one point, thinner markets up to ten, so a niche country burns your allowance fast. And the refresh cycle is slow: some datasets take up to two months to update. If you need daily US data, ImportGenius refreshes faster and you should look there instead.
Who should skip it: anyone not doing import or export. This is a niche intelligence tool, not general prospecting software.
We have not run Volza ourselves. The figures above come from their own materials and pricing pages, read and dated on our full review. When we have used a tool we say so; here we have not, so we do not.
Buying the data first is the common mistake. It is the step that feels like progress, and it is the step that is worth least until you have narrowed the map.