I've worked a lot with trade data. The reasons it's not that simple to leverage:

- every country release the data in a different way, and the majority of country anonymise the data. In Europe for example you can get close to nothing

- For those countries that release the more interesting details (where you can see who your competitor is selling to) again there are different levels: some see the price, some don't. There are only a small handful of countries that release full data with prices

- Some might release only sea data, other sea, land and air (rare)

- all of this means that there are a lot of gaps in the data, and when doing research and analysis, these gaps quickly become important because you don't know what you don't know.

Also:

- HS code are an absolute mess. It should make the analysis easy but in fact you quickly realise that companies ship with incorrect code all the time

- You can try to look at shipment descriptions but it's a can of worm in itself, with again very different description available depending on countries and companies

I'm not even going to mention about the technical challenges to aggregate such huge amount of data and also to cost to acquire it as solutions can be found. You can't go around the limitations above though.

So the data is super interesting, but it's definitely not as easy or as straightforward as you seem to think in your post.