Our story
Built for the desk between the factory and the buyer.
Shiporah started with a simple observation: the most time-consuming part of running an export trading desk is not the trade itself — it is the documents that have to agree with each other at every step.
A trading company sources goods from factories, sells them to buyers overseas, and in between sits a stack of paperwork — the factory's sales note, the commercial invoice, the packing list, the bill of lading, the summary sheet you keep for your own records. Every one of those documents has to carry the same numbers: the same carton counts, the same weights, the same prices, the same exchange rate.
When that reconciliation happens in spreadsheets — one per shipment, one per document type — numbers drift. A price gets updated in the invoice but not the summary. The factory sends a revised sales note and a dozen rows have to be re-entered by hand. The BL comes back from the forwarder and someone spends two hours checking it cell by cell. A small team running twenty shipments a month can easily spend more time on documents than on anything else.
That is the problem Shiporah was built to eliminate.
The system holds each shipment once — the client, the route, the items, the costs, the charges, the exchange rate. Every document that needs those figures pulls from the same record. Change a price and the invoice, the summary and the dashboard all move together. Import the factory's Excel and the items appear, already parsed, with photos attached. Validate the BL draft and the ten checks run automatically. Approve the shipment and the final documents are locked and stored.
No spreadsheet gymnastics. No late-night reconciliations. No documents that disagree with each other.
Why it exists
The specific headaches we went after
Every feature in Shiporah traces back to a real problem that export trading desks run into repeatedly. These are the three that drove the original build.
Cost comes in from the factory in RMB. The invoice goes to the buyer in USD. Profit lives in the spread between them at the day's rate. Doing that in a spreadsheet across dozens of shipments is where margin gets lost. Shiporah holds the rate per shipment and calculates both sides automatically.
The factory sends an Excel workbook. A person re-types it. That person makes a mistake. The mistake ends up on the buyer's invoice. Shiporah imports the workbook directly — descriptions, dimensions, carton weights, product photos — so the data moves from factory to document without anyone in the middle retyping it.
The forwarder's BL draft arrives and someone has to check it against the packing list: right container number, right seal, right port, right weight. Ten checks. Done manually, it takes an hour and still gets missed. Shiporah runs the checks automatically and records any override with a reason.
What we believe
Three things that shape every decision.
These are not values we added to the website. They are the rules we use when deciding what to build — and what not to build.
Numbers that agree
Every figure in every document comes from one source. If the system shows you a number, it is the same number the invoice will print. Consistency is not a nice-to-have — it is the whole point.
The right person sees the right thing
Cost is not the buyer's business. Selling price is not marketing's business. Logistics needs CBM, not margin. Access controls in Shiporah reflect the real separation of concerns in a trading company, not a one-size-fits-all permission model.
Simple beats clever
A five-step shipment lifecycle. Three roles. Five report types. We do not add features because they seem useful in theory — we add them because a real desk was blocked without them. Everything else stays out.
The team
A small team that runs on the same problem.
Shiporah is built and maintained by a small team with direct experience in international trade operations — sourcing from China, invoicing overseas buyers, managing forwarder relationships, and producing the paperwork that sits between all of them.
We use the system ourselves. That means bugs get noticed quickly, missing features are genuinely annoying to us, and the decisions about what to build next come from the same daily frustrations our customers have.
We are not a large software company building tools for a market we read about. We are people who have spent time staring at RMB cost sheets and USD invoices that do not quite agree — and decided to fix it properly.
Get in touch
We would like to hear from you.
Questions about the product, feedback on something that does not work the way you expected, or an enquiry about whether Shiporah fits your operation — email us directly. We read every message.