On March 19, 2020, a wrestling-gear retailer went into lockdown with time on his hands. Twenty-seven days later he launched a free database of U.S. shipping records and posted it to the Amazon sellers community on Reddit. The title was "Free Bill of Lading Database." It passed a million users, then two.
Built in 27 days
That database is ImportYeti. Its founder is open about why it worked. In his own telling, the paper trail behind every ocean shipment into the United States "was public; it just was not accessible," and large importers had been using it for years. He made it free and put it in front of the one audience that would use it hardest: Amazon sellers looking for factories.
The playbook, in their words
Asked on a seller podcast how people use it, the founder described the workflow plainly. Search a competitor. Open its vendor table. Sort by shipment volume. Shortlist the top three to five factories. He called selling only on Amazon "manufacturer arbitrage," which is a polite way of saying the factory is the product.
Jungle Scout, the best-known Amazon seller toolkit, sells the same search inside its supplier database and says so in its own marketing: you can "reverse engineer your competitors' vendors just by typing in their brand name." Type a product listing code instead of a name and it works the same way.
This is not only a small-seller habit. In testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee in May 2023, the chief executive of ImportGenius said nearly one in five Fortune 500 companies has used his platform. He described customers using it to vet suppliers. The record does not know whose suppliers are being vetted.
Search a competitor. Sort its factories by volume. Call the top three.The workflow as described by the founder of the largest free trade-data site, episode 453 of the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast.
Who has already opted out
Plenty of importers know this. In 2017, an analyst at Panjiva told the Associated Press that about a quarter of importers ask for their records to be kept out of public view. The story was about a fashion brand whose suppliers went dark the year its founder took a job in the White House.
Researchers at the Federal Reserve measured the gap in 2023. Depending on the year, 20 to 36 percent of shipper identities in one major trade database were hidden, and the paper noted that companies were more likely to hide new supplier relationships, the ones most likely to carry trade secrets. In other words, the importers who understand the record best protect the part of it that matters most.
The negotiation you did not know you were in
The same table serves two readers. A competitor reads it to find your factory. Your own customer reads it to find your volume and your second source, then walks into the price review knowing both. Neither of them has to tell you they looked.
We put a federal confidentiality protection in place for every entity and name you ship under, and we keep watching the platforms after that. The playbook still exists. It just returns nothing when someone types your name.
Sources
- About ImportYeti · ImportYeti, founder story
- Episode 453: how to find your competitors’ suppliers · My Wife Quit Her Job podcast
- How to find suppliers for Amazon FBA · Jungle Scout
- Testimony of Michael Kanko, ImportGenius, to the House Ways and Means Committee · May 25, 2023
- Ivanka Trump’s business ties go dark · Associated Press, Sep 26, 2017
- Flaaen, Haberkorn, Lewis et al., bill of lading data in international trade research · Review of International Economics, 2023
