- Vendors – companies that provide services to corporations, including banks, large accounting firms, airlines, trade consultants, and freight shippers, often provide data on business practices, legislative or regulatory requirements and political stability as well as basic trade data. Shipper DHL, while no longer serving the U.S. market, offers extensive international export and import information for other countries on its website.
- Trade associations- industry associations often collect data from their members and publish them in aggregate form. While often quite general in nature, this information is still useful to marketers for providing initial insights and establishing benchmarks, for example. World trade clubs and domestic and international chambers of commerce, such as the American Chambers of Commerce Abroad, also provide valuable information about local markets in more detail than other less localized sources can offer.
- Trade magazines, newsletters, and directories – many trade magazines publish special issues or resource directories designed to help subscribers who are international marketers. Appliance Magazine, for example publishes an online Global Supplier Directory ( www.appliancemagazine.com/ensd/) while World Trade Magazine offers a number of papers on topics ranging from risk mitigation to global sourcing.
- Banks and accounting firms, among others, publish client newsletters on specific issues such as international trade finance, contracting, bartering, counter-trade, payment flow, and customs news. There are many industry specific directories, such as the one mentioned from Appliance Magazine. These tend to identify companies and contact information and provide general background information about the companies. They are useful for helping to identify sources or partners.
- Electronic information services – entities known as ” standards institutes” in most of the G8 nations ( Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.) provide online access to their databases of technical standards and trade regulations on specific products. in the U.S., the National Center for Standards and Certification Information ( http://ts.nist.gov/Standards/Information/index.cfm) provides research services on standards, terchnical regulations, and conformity assessment procedures for nonagriculatural products.
- The U.S. Department of Commerce offers trade leads and market research through its combined “GLOBUS (Global Business Opportunities) & NTDB ( National Trade Data Bank)” resource ( www.stat-usa.gov/tradtest.nsf?OpenDatabase). There, users can access the country commercial guides, industry sector analysis reports , and international market insight reports – and that is just a sample.
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