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In our series of online competitive tool reviews, ImportExportBook.com takes a closer look at, Panjiva, founded in 2006 by Josh Green and Jim Psota. Initially launched as GlobalReferenceCheck, co-founders Green and Psota played on Pangaea, the word for the supercontinent that existed before the component continents were separated into their current configuration, to arrive at the brand name – ‘Panjiva’.
The first 5 people to reference this ‘Spotlight Review: Panjiva.com’ article will get 1-week free full trial of Panjiva’s ecommerce engine. This offer only applies to new Panjiva users only.
Introduction & Background
Panjiva.com was born to change the way companies trade across border with objective source of background information. It was launched as a tool deemed to be ‘the most comprehensive source of information on over one million companies from 190 countries’. In this chapter, we will focus on how importers and exporters (who are international buyers) can make use of Panjiva’s data to answer these buyer’s questions:
- Which oversea suppliers, factories, manufacturers, wholesalers are safe for my company to associate with? What is the long-term health of these offshore companies? Who can I really do business with?
- Where are my competitors sourcing from?
- Which suppliers that approach me for business is safe for me to deal with?
- Am I dealing with a parent company or subsidiary firm?
- Who is the biggest US importer for a particular product?
- How a specific buyer-supplier relationship evolves over time? (provided these companies did not opt-out from data collection like what Apple did for their upcoming iPad product launch)
- How can I avoid getting burnt from a contract manufacturing partner in developed or developing nations?
- How can my team share notes among sourcing colleagues to determine the risk/profitability of a buyer/supplier’s relationship? In my opinion, another golden question that needs to be answered for real time collaboration!
Pricing
Panjiva doesn’t offer a try-before-you-buy model for tire-kickers.
The monthly subscription starts from $399/per month for individuals, $999/per month for a team, $2499 per month for professionals. Don’t forget that this is just the cost of screening suppliers, as you have to budget for quality control, on time delivery, product adaptation and so forth.
Panjiva Pricing Plan
User Experience
Do Panjiva offers a competitive advantage in their international market research? Unlike ImportGenius offering more general shipping data, it’s potential user base can be classified in such a way:
- Sourcing executives of major corporates, trade organizations and large buying organizations who want to screen, monitor and vet factory partners, competitors and suppliers with rigorous assessments
- Major investors, economists, stock brokers and business analysts who wants to access accurate and independent information of the global supply chain with aggregated public and proprietary sources
- Manufacturers who want to deal with reliable sourcing companies (potential partners) importing products or components similar to the ones they sell
- US and non-US importers and exporters can use it to:
- track ‘hot’ and ‘not-so-hot’ upcoming product launches and consumer sales
- analyse the ‘highs’ and ‘lows’ of import-export shipping trend with the creative use of various ‘search’ parameters
- track what suppliers are closing down or expanding trade activities in order to invest more time, money and effort to invest in the right factories and manufacturers
- identify socially responsible suppliers who demonstrate compliance towards human rights and labour standards stipulated by Social Accountability International (SAI)
Nevertheless, you can still identify broad segments of manufacturers by country and by region (with the shipping port data) with their free data. For example, I want to shortlist wine producers for my supplier list. I can take the following steps:
Step 1: Identify active suppliers in popular regions
As a new wine buyer, I can identify Australia and Argentina as my business destination to source for the right suppliers. I’ll start with 2084 suppliers.
Sort Wine Suppliers by Country
Step 2: Shortlist suppliers with Panjiva Rating
Since I’m having my holidays in Adelaide, Australia, and I prefer to deal with these new suppliers face-to-face, I will filter the most active manufacturers in Q1 2010. Out of 453 Adelaide wine suppliers, there is 42 active suppliers for Q1 2010 quarter.
Filter Wine Suppliers by Foreign Port
Filter Wine Suppliers by Shipment
Step 3: Shortlist suppliers with 90+ Panjiva Ratings
I will then evaluate, select and qualify the remaining top 8 ‘healthy’ suppliers with the strongest potential to trade across border. I use the term ‘healthy’ because I can’t determine whether this data will lead me to trade with companies that live up to the Panjiva Ratings standard.
Identify Wine Suppliers with Top Panjiva Ratings
Step 4: Verify single supplier’s customer list
As I analyze those data, I noticed that there is actually 5 suppliers from Adelaide with the other 4 from other region. If I did not pay for a Panjiva subscription, I can only guestimate that the other 4 interstate suppliers make use of Adelaide port to export Australia wines overseas. However, if I pay for the subscription, I can magically pull up a list of customers, and true enough, these suppliers have records like a recent shipment from Adelaide to Oakland, California! (see below screenshot)
Australia Wine Supplier's Customer List
Step 5: Screen individual supplier’s shipping trend, credit report, certification and buyer-supplier relationship etc
As an international buyer, I can tap on the aforementioned paid features to get a deeper understanding of business viability with the shortlisted suppliers. We will cover the depth at a later stage. Want more interesting data points to help you with your analysis? Please read on further.
Core Functionality
a) Trade Database
As no single data point is perfect, Panjiva has applied reasonable effort to compile its import database along with its affiliate data feeds to provide a holistic view of a single supplier’s reputation. Since Panjiva’s core customers are mainly from apparel industry, these data sets have yet to offer complete data points that fulfill IMEX Standards. So, Panjiva only offer a facility to ask for more certificate verification for other niche industries.
Panjiva's Certificate Verification Facility
Its database integrity is probably situation-specific as each country’s risk level is different. For example, Jason from SpendMatter explained how Chinese government data may not be as accurate as one wish. He nicely summed up that:
a onetime profiling effort should never be a substitute for consistent and proactive monitoring overtime — nor, when it comes to China especially, should it substitute for continuously monitoring supplier performance management trends as well.
b) Macroeconomic Intelligence – Panjiva Trend
Panjiva Trend helps to aggregate US import trend and profile hot vs not-so-hot demand for the searched product in their world’s heatmap. Panjiva Trends will soon become a part of the company’s Executive Dashboard offering, which will be made fully available in early 2010.
Panjiva Trends
c) Competitive Intelligence – Shipment Stats per Supplier
As a paid user, you can dice the shipment data by size, volume per month/year, departure and arrival port, which gives you a bird’s eye view on how diverse or how consistent is a particular supplier’s import-export activities. By knowing a supplier’s past shipping activities, you can estimate the level of loyalty given by a supplier to your very own market.
d) Market Research – Panjiva Rating
The Panjiva Rating feature is an aggregated data score to help you judge the strengths and weaknesses of each suppliers. It is a rating from 1 to 100. Here’s the rating breakdown:
- A rating of 90 or higher means a supplier’s volumes to the U.S. are growing year over year
- A rating between 70 and 89 means a supplier’s volumes to the U.S. are stable
- A rating below 70 means a supplier’s volumes to the U.S. are declining
- A “Not Rated” means we have insufficient data on that supplier to give it a meaningful evaluation. This could be because a supplier hasn’t shipped a lot to the U.S., or because most of the supplier’s customers have opted out.
This rating takes into account factors such as a supplier’s international track record and compliance efforts, whether it is registered as a legitimate business, the types of products it has shipped and to what types of customers, and how loyal its customers have been. Through the ratings, companies can reduce the time and cost of finding high-quality suppliers, and they are able to draw conclusions about which suppliers are good or bad. In a competitive business environment, you have to constantly build relationships. And, Panjiva Rating can inform you which relationships are worth investing to in the long term.
Track the Good, the Bad, the 'Unknown' Suppliers with Panjiva Ratings
Panjiva’s chart can possibly show a massive decrease to nearly zero kilograms. This can happen when a particular supplier:
- changed its location
- has gone defunct
- opt out from the US Custom’s public shipping data (see below screenshot)
Example of Nike Opting Out of US Custom Data and Panjiva
e) Re-usable Search Data
When you are done with your shortlisting process, you can:
- save it as ‘future alerts’
- bookmark it in your MyPanjiva dashboard
- export your search results as CSV/Excel file
- email your data to a trade analyst or yourself for future reference.
- make quick notes about a particular supplier (see below screenshot)
Panjiva allows your Sourcing Team to Share Notes
Value-added Features
a) Analyze and Discuss In-depth Shipping Data
One of the beauty of Panjiva is that users can search, sort and filter suppliers’ shipment data. You can search with general keywords like ‘wine‘ and long tail keywords like ‘Australia red wine‘. General keywords offer more filtering options like ‘certification’ and ‘affiliate data’ for free users whereas long tail keywords enable users to focus their search intent on specific filtering options like ‘Panjiva Ratings’, Australian suppliers with red flags, Australia-only ports etc. There are tons of creative ways to refine your search with shipment date parameters, HS Code, SAI Certified, WRAP Certified etc, which we will discuss in our virtual chamber of commerce member’s chapter.
Once those data is collated, you can identify whether you have similarly targeted buyers on the supplier list. For instance, I am interested to export wine from Australia to France. As I verify the supplier’s customer list, I found out that one of the buyer, who is from France, also has 11.4% of supplies from my shortlisted suppliers (see below screenshot). In other words, I can confirm that the supplier may be keen to develop its business opportunities further in France.
Panjiva Allows User to Evaluate Supplier-Buyer Relationships
b) Uncover Disguised or ‘Secret’ Brand Names
As some firms will not ship under their own brand name, but under another parent company, you can rely on Panjiva’s advanced search feature to track changes in owner’s brand name by spotting changes in ‘consignee names’ and ‘addresses’ in between a time period or identifying a similar buyer’s pattern among different ‘consignee names’ and ‘addresses’.
Panjiva can track uncover secret brand names
c) Spot Unusual Supply Chain Activities with Panjiva Alerts
Want to avoid getting burnt by unreliable suppliers? Want to find out whether it is time to substitute your badly-performed suppliers? You can sign-up for Panjiva Alerts to get more insightful supply chain information.
API Access
Panjiva has charted on its roadmap to give affiliates an opportunity to make use of their data in their own creative ways. The OnPanjiva program is now open for integration with a broader set of information provider who shares the value of building the ultimate global ecommerce search engine.
Summary
These are the 3 questions that stands out after I assess this tool:
Can Panjiva help importers and exporters to make sense of messy datas?
If selection and assessment of qualified vendors or suppliers prove to be challenging to you, then Panjiva can be better than other web-based business directory and credit rating sites as it aggregates research data with amazing filtering precisions. Especially for importers and exporters, they can increase their bargaining power to ask for a better price from their existing suppliers and work with suppliers who have consistent or strong shipping track record.
Does incomplete data means that its better to have some data than no data?
Panjiva’s data is incomplete in 2 ways:
- It only tracks vessel shipments to USA
- Every buyers has the ability to opt-out of the US Custom data
Unlike Google search engine, its focus on trade search results is less likely spammed with junk company listing. However, due to its lack of maturity, I still think that having some of its data can surely assist US importers and exporters in the selection and assessment of vendors in markets that trade with USA. For non-US importers and exporters, it would be better to cross check your supplier short list with a free account with the particular company’s website. If there is a lack of company information online for most of the companies you intend to deal with, then it is safe to bet on Panjiva’s data to reduce your buying risk. For big orders, buyers should not leave any risk on the table. You can perhaps post a request in our import export forums or import export job board to engage a ‘friendly spy or agent’ to meet up with the foreign supplier in order to complement their supplier search effort with Panjiva’s incomplete database.
Does it provide a competitive edge to international buyers?
Trade details are obviously available and reported in many trade websites. But, combining trade data and trade analysis is surely an ‘edge’ for buyers who fill the ‘knowledge gap’ of competing in fast changing industries like apparel retail or consumer electronics. In terms of return on investment, it will be much cheaper to use Panjiva’s data than to hire a competent analyst who will probably end up using a tool like Panjiva to do the job. Moreover, Panjiva’s fundamental analysis (Panjiva ratings) and technical analysis (detailed shipment stats) of suppliers can be cheaper than a business trip in a 5 star hotel yet allowing you to make a decision to deal or not to deal with a supplier from home.
As VentureBeat wrote:
The White House doesn’t yet have much to show yet for its efforts to make the government more transparent. But, unsurprisingly, the private sector is forging ahead where there are business opportunities.
Panjiva’s effort to become the next search engine for global ecommerce is highly commended. And, I’ll highly recommend this tool to international buyers who have the patience, time and analytical skills to play the game of international trade.
The first 5 people to reference this ‘Spotlight Review: Panjiva.com’ article will get 1-week free full trial of Panjiva’s ecommerce engine. This offer only applies to new Panjiva users only.
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