For exporters

Hand-authored path · written 5 August 2026

Around 80% of the volume of international trade in goods travels by sea (UNCTAD, Review of Maritime Transport programme; accessed 5 August 2026), and every container in that statistic began with somebody doing the same five lookups: which market, which tariff line, which route, which zone, which agreement. The estate keeps each of those lookups on one page. This is the chain, in working order.

1 · The market — country page first, atlas for comparison

Open the country profile for the market you are weighing; when you are still choosing between several, the country atlas lets you sort all 161 registry economies by population, GDP, reported trade and bloc membership in one table instead of fourteen tabs. Note the country’s currency and fiscal year from the atlas row while you are there — both have a way of mattering at invoice time — and read the sector notes with appropriate scepticism, then verify anything decisive at the primary sources listed in the sources registry.

2 · The goods — find your chapter before your forwarder asks

Everything you ship has a Harmonized System classification, and the classification — not the brochure — decides the duty. The HS chapters directory carries the canonical 97-chapter reference table plus 217 country-by-chapter trade briefs, which is enough to place your product family and see who already trades it where. Then diarise one date: the WCO’s HS 2028 edition enters force on 1 January 2028 with 299 sets of amendments — six new headings and 428 new subheadings against 172 deleted — landing the system at 1,229 headings and 5,852 subheadings (World Customs Organization announcement, January 2026; accessed 5 August 2026). If your product sits in a fast-moving category, your code may move under you; exporters who re-check classifications before the switchover avoid the customs queries that follow it.

3 · The route — ports as a system, not a name on a bill

The ports directory classifies 568 ports by country, region, sea and shipping-route class, with 24 hand-authored deep-dive profiles where throughput and hinterland detail exist. Use it to understand what kind of node your origin and destination ports are — a mainline east–west call and a feeder port price and delay very differently — and read your corridor’s row in the corridors directory for trade value, growth and sea transit time. If your economics depend on duty deferral, single-window clearance or zone-level incentives, the SEZ directory geo-classifies 543 special economic zones, with deep dives on eight of them.

4 · The terms — agreements, and the people who answer questions

Before pricing, check whether an agreement changes your arithmetic: the FTAs directory holds 273 agreement records — status, signature and in-force years, reported trade volume — and 68 chapter deep-dives across 16 India-facing agreements, which is where rules of origin and tariff-schedule detail live. A preferential rate you cannot document is a full rate; the deep-dives are explicit about that friction. Then use the trade-bodies directory — 1,349 chambers, councils and associations with country and category — because in export practice the right desk officer answers in a day what a search engine cannot answer at all.

5 · The prose layer — when you need the argument, not the row

Tables answer what; the writing answers whether. The Trade & Business section is the door to the whole trade family, including the legacy page inventories (all FTA pages, all corridor pages, the HS universe). The narrative’s Trade touchpoint argues the cross-border decision at essay length, and AFG Trade, the satellite, compresses the practice into one sentence worth keeping taped above the desk: selling to a market you don’t live in is a chain of handovers, and deals die at the handovers. Every directory above exists so that at each handover — goods, paperwork, money, risk — you already know the names.

The short version