Exporting to the United States – A Team Canada Inc Publication
2.2 Is there a market for your product or service?
A good way to start your market research is to identify the value of U.S. imports related to your industry sector; this will give you an idea of the demand for your type of product from Canada.
The Trade Data Online tools on Industry Canada's Strategis Web site will help you determine how much export business your sector carried on in the U.S. over various time periods. However, this will only tell you how much of your type of product was imported into the U.S. from Canada. For a complete picture of the U.S. import market, you'll need a U.S. statistical source, such as the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Remember, also, to examine how U.S. domestic production fills the needs of the U.S. market.
Also be aware that these statistics might not tell the whole story. For example, goods may be officially recorded as imports into one state, but are really destined for another state. If you don't do your research, you may end up targeting the wrong market.
To retrieve the Trade Data Online information – and for many other purposes – you'll need to determine the Harmonized System code (HS code) of your product. If you're not familiar with HS codes, they're an internationally developed and implemented commodity-description and coding system, upon which the tariffs of most countries are based. We'll examine HS codes in more detail in Section 7.3, "Harmonized System (HS) codes".
Also invaluable at the early states of market research are the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service (TCS) sectoral market studies and country-specific reports. Provided free of charge, the reports are prepared by International Trade Canada's Market Research Centre and by Canada's offices abroad.
The Web site of the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. gives contact information for Canadian trade specialists both in the U.S. capital and in Canadian consulates across the U.S. The embassy site also has a list of Canadian government offices in the U.S.
Another resource for targeted research about potential exports is the Trade Team Canada Sectors Web site. It's a handy gateway to information about major Canadian business sectors, their markets, strategies and so on. Sectors covered include:
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