How I built an LLM-powered B2B matching engine for China's small commodity export market

I've been building in the Canada-China B2B trade space for a while, and the biggest friction I kept running into was this: global buyers don't know how to find the right Chinese supplier , and Chinese suppliers have no efficient way to reach international buyers. The traditional approach — Alibaba, trade shows, cold email — is slow, expensive, and heavily relationship-dependent. I wanted to fix this with LLMs. The Problem China's small commodity export market (小商品出海) is massive. Yiwu alone processes over $70B in annual wholesale trade. Yet a Canadian retailer trying to source bamboo kitchenware, or an Australian importer looking for OEM pet toys, has no good way to describe what they want and get matched with the right factory. Search engines return SEO spam. Alibaba is a catalogue you have to manually browse. Trade shows require flights to Guangzhou. The entire process assumes you already know who you're looking for. The Approach: Intent-Based Semantic Matching Instead of keyword sear