Marketplace connecting small importers with customs brokers

Customs brokerage has an unspoken threshold at $5,000. Shipments above that number attract eager brokers fighting for the deal. Anything below it? Radio silence. Whether it's a $300 vintage auto part or a $50 sample order from Alibaba, the experience is identical: emails that vanish into the void, voicemails that never get returned, and cargo racking up storage charges in customs limbo with no one lifting a finger. The explosion of cross-border e-commerce has spawned millions of smaller importers. Yet the brokerage world continues catering exclusively to the heavy hitters. Clearport operates as a two-sided marketplace that lets small importers submit shipment information and receive competing real-time bids from pre-vetted customs brokers. The importer provides the basics: shipment value, country of origin, product category. Brokers fire back with pricing, estimated turnaround, and their port-specific expertise. Each broker maintains a profile powered by authenticated reviews, job completion percentages, and historical pricing data. The importer selects their preferred match, funds go into escrow, and the broker takes over clearance. Cargo that previously languished for weeks awaiting a callback now moves through customs in days. Begin with a simple web form for importers to detail their shipments. Create a broker-facing dashboard for submitting quotes with delivery timelines. Integrate Stripe Connect to manage payments and escrow. Build out verified broker profiles featuring ratings, completion metrics, and port-level specializations. Go live in LA, Miami, or NYC with 50 importers and 10 brokers eager to capture the small-shipment segment. Facilitate the first 20 pairings by hand to uncover which cargo categories generate the most friction, which broker specializations carry the most weight, and where the quoting workflow falls apart. Clearport takes a 5 to 10 percent fee on each completed transaction. Brokers subscribe at $200 a month for priority visibility and a steady pipeline of deals they'd never land through cold outreach. The real asset, though, is the transaction data accumulating underneath. Every successful clearance contributes another signal: pricing indexed by HS code, processing speed by port, broker dependability segmented by shipment category. Over time, that dataset evolves into the industry's first true pricing benchmark. Growth tracks alongside the importer's own trajectory: shipment monitoring, tariff estimation tools, compliance workflow automation, and end-to-end import onboarding designed for DTC brands expanding across borders.