Choosing the wrong market costs a year. Most of what you need to decide is already public — if you know which numbers to look at.
The first number is total import value for your product. If a country imports a few million dollars a year of it, the buyer list will be short regardless of data quality. Start where the demand is, then narrow.
Import value by market is published on our product pages.
A high China share means a proven supply chain and an uphill negotiation — buyers have established relationships and benchmark prices. A low share can mean an open door, or a reason you have not thought of yet: certification, tariff treatment, specification preference, or an incumbent supplier with a lock on the category. Worth investigating rather than assuming either way.
If one origin supplies most of the market, that incumbent is the thing you have to displace. If supply is spread across many origins, buyers are already comfortable shopping around — usually an easier market to enter.
A growing import category means you can win share without taking it from anyone. A shrinking one means every order you win comes off someone else's plate, and price pressure will be constant.
Duty rates, product certification, labelling rules and packaging requirements vary by market — and in some categories they are the difference between viable and not. These are regulatory questions with official answers; check the importing country's own customs and standards authority rather than a third-party summary. Our sources note records where the regulatory position has been verified against the original text.
A market that passes all five is worth a serious attempt. A market that fails the first one is not worth any of the others. And a market that passes one to four is worth investigating the fifth before you spend anything — because a certification requirement discovered after you have built a buyer list is expensive.
Tell us the product and the market. We will reply with what the records actually contain for it — which markets have shipment detail, which have statistics only, and what a working list would look like. No charge, and no obligation.