ImportYeti Alternative Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

importyeti.com aggregates US Customs bill-of-lading filings (public record under the US Trade Act and FOIA) into free-to-browse importer/supplier trade profiles — the same underlying data ImportYeti, Panjiva, and ImportGenius charge $99-$399+/mo to access. This Actor wraps importyeti.com's keyless JSON search endpoint directly, writing one structured row per matched company: shipment counts, most-recent activity, country, address, and linked trademarks.

Give it company names or product keywords (searchQueries) or direct ImportYeti profile URLs (profileUrls) and it resolves each one to a matched importer or supplier row, deduplicated by URL slug so the same company matched twice is only pushed and charged once.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so importyeti.com sees a browser, not Python.
• 🌐 Residential proxy by default via Apify Proxy — importyeti.com Cloudflare-challenges requests from flagged datacenter IPs, so this is the first Actor in our fleet where RESIDENTIAL ships on by default, not opt-in.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Fresh session + profile rotation on every block — a Cloudflare challenge or 403/429 mints a new proxy session and browser fingerprint before retrying.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, deduplicated by slug, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you pay only for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge (beyond the small actor-start warm-up fee).

💡 Use cases

• Sales prospecting — build a list of US importers already shipping a competitor's product category, ranked by shipment volume.
• Sourcing research — find foreign suppliers already shipping into the US for a given product, without cold-emailing trade shows.
• Competitive intel — track how often a competitor's known importer or supplier appears in fresh filings.
• M&A / supply-chain diligence — sanity-check a target company's declared trade volume and country exposure in minutes.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Enter one or more searchQueries (company names or product keywords) and/or profileUrls — at least one is required.
3. Optionally narrow with companyTypeFilter, countryCode, or minShipments.
4. Click Start. Matched rows stream into the run's dataset as they're found.
5. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
searchQueries	array	no*	—	Company names or product keywords to search, ≤50 items.
profileUrls	array	no*	—	Direct ImportYeti profile URLs to resolve one-for-one, ≤200 items.
companyTypeFilter	string	no	"any"	Restrict to "importer" or "supplier" rows.
countryCode	string	no	—	ISO-3166-1 alpha-2, e.g. "CN".
minShipments	integer	no	—	Drop rows with fewer total shipments on file.
maxResultsPerQuery	integer	no	10	Cap matched rows per searchQueries entry, 1-100.
proxyConfiguration	object	no	RESIDENTIAL on	Apify Proxy config. Defaults to {"useApifyProxy": true, "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]}.

* At least one of searchQueries / profileUrls is required.

Example input

{
  "searchQueries": ["Patagonia"],
  "profileUrls": ["https://www.importyeti.com/company/patagonia"],
  "companyTypeFilter": "any",
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 2,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one matched importer or supplier profile, deduplicated by slug within a run.

Field	Type	Notes
company_name	string	Legal name from US Customs filings.
company_type	string	"importer" (US consignee) or "supplier" (foreign shipper).
country	string | null	Country of registration, full name.
country_code	string | null	ISO-3166-1 alpha-2.
address	string | null	Address from most recent customs record.
total_shipments	integer | null	Total bill-of-lading count on file.
most_recent_shipment_date	string | null	ISO YYYY-MM-DD.
other_addresses_count	integer | null	Distinct alternative addresses on file.
other_names_count	integer | null	Distinct alternative names (DBAs, subsidiaries, typo variants).
trademarks	array	Linked brand names — empty array when none.
profile_url	string	Canonical importyeti.com/company|supplier/{slug} URL.
slug	string	URL slug — dedup key.
source_query	string | null	Which searchQueries entry matched, if search mode.
rank	integer | null	Position in the search-API ranking (1 = top).
scraped_at	string	ISO-8601 UTC timestamp when this row was recorded.

Example output

{
  "company_name": "Patagonia, Inc.",
  "company_type": "importer",
  "country": "United States",
  "country_code": "US",
  "address": "259 W Santa Clara St, Ventura, CA 93001",
  "total_shipments": 4218,
  "most_recent_shipment_date": "2026-06-30",
  "other_addresses_count": 6,
  "other_names_count": 3,
  "trademarks": ["Patagonia"],
  "profile_url": "https://www.importyeti.com/company/patagonia",
  "slug": "patagonia",
  "source_query": "Patagonia",
  "rank": 1,
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-19T12:00:00+00:00"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.005	One-off warm-up charge per run
result-row	$0.005	Per matched company/supplier row written to the dataset

Example: 1 000 rows ≈ $5.01 (1 000 × $0.005 + one $0.005 start charge). No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

v1 output is company/supplier trade-profile rollups (shipment counts, most-recent activity, country, address, trademarks) — not full per-shipment bill-of-lading line items (individual date/HS-code/weight/port per shipment), which live behind importyeti.com's Cloudflare-gated profile pages. Non-US customs data (India/Zauba, China, etc.) is out of scope; a separate Actor would cover that. Account/login-gated features (saved searches, CSV bulk export, alerts) are not part of v1.

❓ FAQ

Does this include full shipment-level bill-of-lading detail (HS code, weight, port)?

Not in v1. Per-shipment line items live behind importyeti.com's Cloudflare-gated profile pages; v1 ships company/supplier trade-profile rollups (shipment counts, most-recent activity, country, trademarks) via the confirmed keyless search endpoint. Per-shipment detail is a flagged roadmap item.

Do I need an ImportYeti, Panjiva, or ImportGenius account?

No. This Actor uses importyeti.com's public, keyless search endpoint directly — no login, no subscription.

Why does this default to a residential proxy?

importyeti.com Cloudflare-challenges requests from flagged datacenter IPs. We default proxyConfiguration to Apify's RESIDENTIAL group so runs clear the challenge without you tuning anything.

What happens if a search query or profile URL doesn't match?

That entry is recorded as a failed outcome and the run continues with the rest — we never silently return an empty dataset with a green status.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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