Six questions, before we spend a producer's time.

An export enquiry costs a producer real money before anyone has agreed to anything. A sample set to the Gulf is a courier bill and a day of somebody's week. A specification response for a retail buyer can take a small producer several days, especially the first time. If that work is done for a buyer who was never in a position to order, the producer has paid for our optimism, and they are entitled to expect better from an agent.

There is a second reason. A producer deciding whether to work with us wants to know that we will not simply forward every email that arrives. This page is the answer to that, and it is published so a producer can hold us to it.

• The requirement. The product, the specification and the format. Not a category. A buyer who cannot describe what they want in a sentence is usually still deciding, and a producer should not be paying for that decision.
• Volume and frequency. An indicative first order and a realistic reorder cycle. Small is fine and expected. Vague is the problem, because a producer needs to know whether the enquiry fits their capacity before they engage with it.
• Route to market. Who ends up selling the product: your own retail, a grocery chain, hospitality, or onward distribution. It changes the packaging, the label, the price point and often whether the product is viable at all.
• Licences and clearance. Whether you hold the import licence for the destination or work through a broker who does, and who handles in market labelling and product registration. In most of our markets those sit with the importer, and if nobody holds them the shipment cannot land.
• Payment terms. The terms you normally work on and the instrument you expect to use. A producer taking a first export order is usually not able to carry sixty day open terms with an unknown counterparty, and it is far better to find that out now than after a container is on the water.
• Timing. When you need it, and what is driving that date. A season, a listing review, a tender or a store opening are all real. No date at all usually means the project is not funded yet.

A registered business we can find. A company name, a registration number and a trading address that exist in the destination's own register, and a website or a verifiable presence consistent with the volume being discussed. A business email on a domain the company controls. Where a buyer is in a market with a public register, we look at it.

We also check the obvious sanctions and restricted party position for the counterparty and the destination before making an introduction, and we decline what we cannot clear. We are not a compliance function and we do not pretend to be one: the producer, as exporter of record, carries the legal obligation. But an agent who made no check at all would be handing that problem to the producer without warning.

Then we do not make the introduction, and there is no hard feeling in it. Some buyers are genuinely unable to share volumes or customer names early, and where that is the case we will say what we can proceed with and what we cannot. We will sign a reasonable non disclosure agreement, and we will read it before we do. The one thing we will not agree to is confidentiality that prevents us telling the producer who the buyer is, because a disclosed introduction is the entire model.

This is one page of the buyer side. The rest, including what buying through a disclosed agent costs you, which is nothing, is on buying through a disclosed agent.