Harmonized System commodity codes

The HS classification used to code traded products in customs statistics, queryable to six digits or lower in USA Trade Online alongside NAICA-equivalent commodity codes.

Aluminum, for instance, sits in HS chapter 76 spanning thousands of series over roughly 25 years of monthly data.

In this catalog it appears concretely: - USA Trade Online (tagging) — "hs-codes".

Conventions decide whether two sources can be joined at all. Buy one side of an analysis that ignores this convention and every reconciliation step — calendar alignment, unit conversion, entity matching — lands on your team instead of the vendor's.

The failure mode is concrete: a source can carry the Harmonized System commodity codes label while differing from what you need on exactly the dimension that matters — Official U.S. Census Bureau platform for import and export statistics, queryable by Harmonized System or NAICS commodity code across country, district, state and port dimensions. Comparing two sources on that line usually settles the choice faster than any feature matrix.

You rarely have to take a vendor's word for it. 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free to access, and USA Trade Online lets you inspect the real artifact before any budget is committed.

Treat every claim of this attribute as testable:

1. Read USA Trade Online's record on tagging — "hs-codes" — then confirm the delivered artifact matches before you license anything.
2. Pin down update cadence in writing. Across this catalog, 22.6% of 1,744 datasets refresh daily and 64 still arrive only through a manual request form, so ask exactly how fresh each release is.
3. Check whether definitions are verified at all. Field definitions are verified for 1495 of 1,744 datasets (85.7%), and any source you license should meet that bar.
4. Price the delivery route before the license. In this catalog bulk download is the most common access method (725 datasets) ahead of official APIs (574), and 379 sources still require scraping — a maintenance cost that lands on you, not the vendor.

See the term applied to real records: aluminum data, technology-distributors data.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: - comext trade statistics - customs district port breakdown