bill of lading

A bill of lading is the document a carrier issues for a consignment, filed with customs, naming shipper, consignee and the goods moved. In the Datadory catalog the term names a data product built from those filings: the ImportGenius - Bill of Lading Search record tags itself 'bill of lading', 'customs data' and 'shipping records'.

The commercial scale is unusual. The record's own size estimate claims ~8 billion shipment records globally, of which 258.5 million are US import and 5.6 million US export shipments. Coverage windows are explicit: US imports from 2006 to present, US exports from January 2014, and per-country start and end dates for the 25+ other reporting countries it aggregates.

Delivery is daily, and the grain is "bill-of-lading level shipment records aggregated into company profiles" - consignments first, importer and exporter entities second.

It is the difference between supplier claims and supplier evidence. Marketing lists and website scrapes say who a company says it buys from; bill-of-lading filings show consignments that actually cleared customs.

• Provenance is checkable. Because US rows derive from CBP ocean-freight manifests, a buyer can compare a vendor's counts against the public record instead of trusting a dashboard.
• Country windows vary. Each non-US country has its own start and end dates, so a "global" plan may still be missing years for a specific sourcing market.
• Cost is material. The cataloged record is paid-only with no free trial, and downloads are capped per seat per month by tier - budget the row caps into any supplier-discovery workflow.

The catalog scores it 5/10 on Datadory's rubric, largely reflecting that access friction rather than the underlying public-record source.

1. Ask where the rows originate. ImportGenius states US data comes from CBP ocean-freight manifests; a vendor who will not name a source cannot be reconciled against anything.
2. Test counts against public record. 258,473,434 US import shipments is a checkable claim - sample a known importer and compare consignment counts by year.
3. Confirm the country calendar. Coverage is per country with its own window, so verify your sourcing markets' start dates before signing an annual plan.

Where to see it in context: trading-companies-distributors data.

These entries sit next to bill of lading in trade-data work:

• customs-data — the broader category of shipment-level import and export records filed with national customs authorities.
• hs-code — the product classification used to slice consignments by commodity.
• wholesale-trade — the NAICS 424 distribution sector most often profiled from these filings.