Methodology

How Mati’s supplier data is built

The supplier and distributor pages describe trade activity observed on US customs records. This page says exactly where that comes from, what each figure means, when it changes, and what it cannot tell you.

Current data: Sep 21, 2025 – Aug 19, 2026 · Updated Aug 27, 2026

Source

US ocean import records — the bills of lading filed with US Customs and Border Protection for sea freight entering the United States. Each record names the shipper, the consignee, the product description, the ports and the carrier. Air, road and rail freight are not included.

Coverage: 66,459 suppliers across 168 countries and 275,487 shipments; 32,309 US-based companies importing from 40,672 suppliers, 152,359 shipments.
Mode: ocean freight only. Air, road, rail and postal imports are not in the records.
Direction: imports into the United States. A company’s exports to other countries are not represented.
Names, addresses and product descriptions are reproduced as filed. Spelling variants of one company are linked to a single canonical page rather than merged.

Definitions

Shipment: One bill of lading on the US ocean import records: one filing, whatever its size. Counts are shipments in the analysed window unless labelled ‘all time’.
Supplier: The company named as shipper on a record, after classification removed freight forwarders, consolidators and carriers’ own subsidiaries — a middleman is not a factory.
Buyer: The US company named as consignee. ‘Buyers’ on a supplier profile is the count of distinct consignees in the window.
US distributor / component supplier / sales arm: US-addressed consignees classified from what they import and from whom: a distributor resells finished goods to businesses; a component supplier is a US manufacturer whose products go into other products; a sales arm imports its own group’s goods.
Analysed window: The span between the earliest and latest shipment held for a company. The all-time figures on a profile come from the source export and cover the company’s whole record.
TEU: Twenty-foot equivalent units, summed over the window’s shipments where the record states container size.
Declared value (CIF): Cost, insurance and freight value as declared on the filing, summed over the window; shown only where the records carry it.
HS code: The Harmonized System tariff heading declared on the filing. It says what class of goods moved, not the product’s specification or the company’s capability.
Year on year / quarter on quarter: The change in the supplier’s shipment count against the equivalent prior period, from the source export. Shown as ‘Not enough comparable data’ when the prior period is empty.

Update cadence

Counts, charts and top lists are regenerated when a new export of customs records is loaded, and every page states the date of the data it shows (currently Aug 27, 2026). A profile’s content changes only when new shipments for that company are observed, and its sitemap lastmod is the date of its latest shipment — not the day the site was rebuilt.

What “verified” and “active” mean

A supplier is listed because its name appears as the shipper on at least one US ocean import record. ‘Active’ means the latest shipment date shown on its profile; the analysed window and the data update date are stated on every page. Activity is evidence that goods moved — it is not a certification, a quality check, or a statement of capacity.

Limitations

No. Shipment counts, buyers and recency show trade activity only. They do not verify product quality, certifications, production capacity, minimum order quantities, pricing, lead times, or whether a company will take on a new buyer. Use the evidence to shortlist, then verify directly.

Product descriptions are the filer’s words for what moved, often truncated. They are not a catalogue.
An HS code is a tariff class. Two suppliers under the same heading can make very different things.
Some filings name a forwarder or consolidator as shipper. Classification removes the ones it recognises; a profile marked “not yet classified” may still be one.
Contact details are shown one company at a time to signed-in users, from the filing. They may be out of date.

Which profiles are indexed

Every profile is live and linked, but only profiles with enough unique evidence ask search engines to index them: at least 3 shipments, a country, at least 2 counterparties (or 3 or more distinct product descriptions), and at least 2 evidence sections. Thinner and duplicate profiles render noindex, follow and are left out of the sitemap, which lists the strongest profiles first.