How to evaluate an international supplier offer
Seller offers fail differently from buyer requirements. They are easier to publish, easier to exaggerate, and far more numerous — so the reading method has to be different too.
This is an explanation Ponte wrote, not a record Ponte observed. Figures quoted in it are counted from the register at the time you load the page. Last revised 9 Sep 2026.
Supply is louder than demand
Ponte's register currently holds 5,925 buyer requirements and 1,964 seller offers. That asymmetry is normal for public trade sources and it shapes how each side should be read: an offer costs almost nothing to publish, so the bar for taking one seriously has to be higher.
Ignore adjectives entirely
"Premium", "export quality", "grade A" and "best price" carry no information. They appear on offers that are real and on offers that are not, in the same words, because they cost nothing to write.
Ponte composes its own sentence for each record from structured fields rather than reproducing the source's prose, which removes most of this automatically. Where a grade or specification survives into the product name, treat it as a claim, not a fact.
Look for the facts that are expensive to state
A supplier who states a specific quantity available, a delivery term and a payment term has made three commitments that can later be held against them. A supplier who states only a product and a country has made none.
- A quantity with a unit Ponte recognised and reproduced exactly
- A delivery term, which implies they know who is arranging carriage
- Payment terms stated as a term rather than as a paragraph of conditions
- An origin country the model could resolve
Check the origin against the product
The single fastest credibility check available on an offer is whether the stated origin plausibly produces or re-exports the stated product at the stated volume. A great many published offers fail this test immediately.
Ponte records the origin the source stated and resolves it to a country where it can. It does not verify that the party is located there, and a stated origin is not evidence of production capacity.
What an offer never tells you
Whether the goods exist, whether the party controls them, and whether they can perform. Those are questions for due diligence and inspection, not for a register, and no amount of structure on a public record substitutes for either.
Sources
Where this guide relies on somebody else’s authority, it says so and links to them rather than restating their work.
- ICC — Incoterms® rules — The authoritative source for delivery-term obligations. Rules text is ICC copyright and is not reproduced here.
- WCO — Harmonized System — The World Customs Organization's nomenclature, the canonical basis for classifying traded goods.
Incoterms® and the Incoterms® 2020 logo are trademarks of ICC. Use of these trademarks does not imply association with, approval of or sponsorship by ICC.
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