Zepol’s recent creation of the “HTS Code Widget” allows media partners and industry professionals to access up-to-date statistics on thousands of HTS Codes…directly from their websites!

It’s easy as 1, 2, 3:

This widget is available to media partners as well as industry professionals. If your company is interested in including this value-added service to your website, please Contact Us and we’ll send you the code to get rolling!

On a good day, I am a poor golfer. I pull my head up too quickly and too much, obviously reeking havoc on my golf swing. But working in the practice dome can make it better. In Minnesota, we love to "work on our swings" over the winter indoors to get better, and the same is true in Zepol's cubicles, offices, meeting room, CoLo, and board room. Businesses that keep their heads down and eyes on the ball take better swings at new products, new customers, and new markets.

As easy as it sounds, it is incredibly difficult to do consistently. There are distractions or competitors around every corner, leading to your thoughts and efforts to lose steam. Growing, profitable companies see that keeping your focus on what's currently in the inbox gets things done. Good weeks turn into good months, and good months turn into great, profitable quarters. Clearly, we need to check out the landscape occasionally, but at the end of the day, resources need to be in the here and now.

Zepol's head will be down and eye firmly planted on the ball in 2011. We look forward to adding a slew of new enhancements and updates this year. I hope the same is true for your business. Best of luck in 2011!

Like most business people, I am often asked "what does your company do?" My short answer is usually "Zepol provides information services to international trade professionals". However, behind the scenes, I view us as a software development company running at full speed. We continually enhance existing services and develop new services for our customer base, in order to maintain and grow our revenue streams. Our focus is pretty straight forward - build something our customers are asking for, let marketing and sales take over, and then get right back to building some more. The key for us is to continually add value for our customer base and that means rapid development!

I was recently on the east coast meeting with customers and prospects and was talking to an existing customer who mentioned "you have rolled out some nice upgrades recently". I asked him how many he thought we have done in the past year and he replied "three or four". When I informed him we had actually completed fourteen significant enhancements in twelve months, he was floored. This particular customer was impacted by only a few recent enhancements, but our customer base as a whole has benefitted by all fourteen major enhancements (fifteen as of this week).

Despite surveys and customer visits, it is difficult to know exactly which "enhancement"  will impact each customer. Customers have very different needs and if you focus in on only the needs of a few, you risk alienating the others – that is a slippery slope. Additionally, dedicating resources to only meeting the needs of your top customers may ultimately reduce your growth potential with the rest of the market. So, what do you do?

At Zepol, we have decided to solicit feedback from all our customers. Additionally, we value input from our employees (including those not involved in day to day product development). Lastly, we are dedicated to leading the market in product innovation and putting the resources in place to make this a reality.

Today, Zepol launched a new enhancement for all TradeIQ Professional and Enterprise users that allows them to create and download over 8 million different types of aggregate reports. This upgrade provides our users with the most advanced reporting capabilities for aggregate reports or roll ups.

We created this reporting upgrade after we looked at the alternative of creating a host of aggregate standardized reports. However, we knew we could never keep up with the number of unique reports that our customers would have requested. In addition, we have a philosophy to provide our users with as much choice and information as possible. Hence, we decided to create an engine that can create up to 8 million different aggregate reports that allows users to define the aggregate reports they need.

This enhancement is all about answering questions for our users, which the stakeholders in their companies ask them on a daily basis that only trade data can answer. Instead of sifting through thousands of Bill of Lading records, we have made it possible to report on these elements easily across large spans of time.

As part of this enhancement, we have created a video, shown below, to illustrate the enhancement to our users:



Below are samples of several reports that can be created from our new ‘Customize Grid Report’ functionality:

• Trade Lane Analysis for Consignees in a State
• Market Share Analysis for a Product
• Analysis of Vessels and Associated Carriers in a Trade Lane

Zepol is very proud of this enhancement and would like to celebrate by providing free trials to readers of our blog and any company interested in Zepol’s trade data tools. Click here to sign up for your free trial.