Seven years. From Isfahan to Toronto. One mission.
From an Isfahan idea to a Toronto pivot, through the AI awakening and the tariff wars, to a focused Shopify B2B bet for the age of intelligent commerce.
An idea is born.
The story of J Trade Help began in Isfahan. A small team of trade economists and software builders saw the same problem repeat itself: exporters were making million-dollar market decisions with fragmented, outdated, and frankly confusing data.
We started with a simple question: what if we could turn the noise of world trade - tariffs, HS codes, customs flows, market signals - into something clear, visual, and actionable for a real business owner?
We started, we shipped, we earned trust.
For three years we worked from our first market - building the first version of J Trade Help, refining the market-selection engine, and taking on real export projects for real businesses.
We made money. We learned the craft. And we learned something uncomfortable: most customers weren't buying software - they were buying our judgment. The business was growing, but it was growing linearly, powered by consulting hours, not product leverage.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world. Borders closed, supply chains froze, and the pace of our development slowed dramatically. Without that global disruption, we would have reached international markets far sooner.
We moved to our new home base.
Later that year, we relocated the company to Toronto. New country, new market, new rules, but the same mission: help businesses trade smarter across borders.
We started working directly with local SMBs and exporters, plugging our trade intelligence into their real-world decisions. Our new home gave us proximity to a modern SMB ecosystem, world-class ports, and a front-row seat to how North American businesses actually buy and sell across borders.
Then AI changed everything.
Just as we were finding our footing in our new home, the world shifted. LLMs went from research demos to daily tools. Businesses that were spreadsheet-first became AI-curious almost overnight.
We saw two things clearly: the future of trade intelligence had to be conversational and agentic, and the customers most ready to adopt AI were the ones already living online - digital-native SMBs, Shopify merchants, e-commerce operators, not legacy trading houses stuck in email and PDFs.
Global tariffs got weaponised.
Then came the tariff shocks. Sudden duties, retaliatory measures, supply-chain reroutes, and a new political reality where a single announcement could redraw the map for entire industries overnight.
Our exporter customers were flooded with the same panicked questions: Which market is still viable? Which HS codes are exposed? Who is buying - and where - right now? Trade data stopped being a nice-to-have and became a survival tool.
We built PLG - Purchase Lead Generation.
In 2025 we launched PLG (plg.jtradehelp.com): search by HS code, preview companies with real import activity, and unlock verified contacts when you're ready to reach out.
It worked. We had customers. We had revenue. Exporters loved being able to skip cold prospecting and go straight to firms already importing similar goods.
But behind the scenes, every deal still needed custom validation - different country, different HS code, different definition of a qualified buyer. Great business, still not the fully repeatable software product we were reaching for.
New market. Sharper product. Shopify B2B.
In 2026 we made our sharpest bet yet: focus on Shopify Plus B2B, where AI-ready SMBs already run a shared commerce operating layer - RFQs, approvals, purchase orders, locked pricing - with the same repeating workflows.
We're building an AI-native B2B app that turns quote conversations into checkout-ready Shopify orders. Same mission - helping businesses trade better - but this time on a platform where one focused product can serve thousands of merchants.
Building for Black Friday 2026.
Our next chapter is a focused Shopify B2B app - AI-native, quote-to-checkout, built for merchants who are ready to let intelligent workflows do the heavy lifting.