How digital services can turn the nervous trader into a confident one

Spend time with the people who run small trading businesses, and you quickly notice that they know their products inside out; they understand their suppliers, their margins and their customers. And yet, when it comes to completing a declaration or choosing a commodity code, many of them worry about getting it wrong.

We’ve come to describe this mindset as the nervous trader. Our user researchers have spoken to small businesses across import and export, from micro-businesses shipping weekly to overseas customers to growing manufacturers entering new markets. The same concern surfaced repeatedly – these are capable, commercially sharp people, and the worry they described came from the systems around them rather than from any gap in their own knowledge.

A rational response to an uncertain system

That nervousness goes well beyond individual businesses. UK goods exports to the EU have fallen sharply since Brexit, with smaller firms disproportionately affected, and research from the LSE’s Centre for Economic Performance suggests around one in seven UK businesses have stopped trading with the EU altogether. Surveys from the Federation of Small Businesses and the British Chambers of Commerce continue to point to customs processes and compliance complexity as leading barriers for SMEs.

Seen from the trader’s side, the caution makes complete sense. The founder of a cycling apparel brand told us that when you’re paying hundreds to ship something, you don’t want to be getting it wrong. An importer of sheepskin baby products explained how the origin, treatment and finishing of a material can all change the way it’s declared. Guidance exists, but it rarely answers the question she actually has, which is: what this means for her shipment today.

So, people adapt. They lean on brokers and freight forwarders, ask AI tools, and build their own checklists of websites and contacts for every consignment. Some delay entering new markets, and some step back from trade entirely. Confidence ends up sitting outside the business, with whoever is willing to interpret the rules on its behalf.

Designing for decisions rather than information

The Online Trade Tariff (OTT) is the free GOV.UK service traders use to look up the commodity codes, duties and rules that apply to the goods they import and export. The content behind it has always been robust, so working alongside HMRC, our focus has been on evolving it from a detailed reference tool into a service that helps traders make the right decision for their goods, with confidence.

We’ve co-designed with traders and concentrated on those with the least customs experience. The results have been encouraging. The share of classification attempts that fail completely has fallen from 18 percent to two percent, ease-of-use scores have risen from 3.46 to 4.58, and long-standing users have told us the tariff is the best it’s ever been.

One of the clearest examples of designing for confidence is MyOTT, a personalised space within the OTT where traders sign in to follow the commodity codes and updates that matter to their business. Traders told us how much time they spent re-checking the tariff for changes, so MyOTT lets them build a watchlist of their codes, receive alerts through GOV.UK whenever something changes, and download the details to share with others in their supply chain.

When traders asked to check whether their saved codes were still valid, we added a status showing whether each is active, expired or not recognised. More than 1,000 subscriptions came in shortly after launch, and one trader summed up the value, saying it will reduce effort, reduce time and remove doubt.

Put simply, removing doubt is a design goal in its own right, and it’s one we can measure.

AI that understands what traders mean

AI has a real role to play here, provided it is grounded in how traders actually think. Most people don’t arrive at the tariff knowing the legal description of their goods. They arrive with a product, a destination and a deadline. Our current work with HMRC explores how AI can interpret that plain-English intent and guide traders through the most difficult classification journeys.

Early results are promising. In testing, AI-assisted journeys reduced high-confidence but incorrect outcomes by between 25 percent and 50 percent – that’s the most dangerous category of compliance error, where a trader feels sure but is wrong. A five-week AI lab validated the approach, helping make the case to scale it into a full programme.

Making confidence a shared outcome

The bigger opportunity sits across government, as traders don’t experience services by department. One business owner described switching between customs agent platforms, freight websites, several government sites and paper documents for a single consignment – the trader is left to stitch these services together, and that is where nervousness grows.

The UK Trade Strategy sets a clear ambition to reduce friction and help more SMEs trade internationally. Meeting it will take services that tell a trader what applies to them, warn them when something changes, and connect so that the burden of integration doesn’t fall on the smallest businesses.

If we treat confidence as a primary, measurable outcome of public service design, we give ourselves a practical lever for widening participation in trade. The nervous trader is a signal worth listening to – design well for the business owner who is worried about getting it wrong, and we help many more capable UK businesses trade with ambition.

See Jose Puyana, Transform’s Director of Trade & Growth, on stage with Philippa Evans from HMRC at Think AI for Government, where they’ll be discussing the topic in greater detail.

Read more about the personalisation of the UK’s Online Trade Tariff, or explore Transform’s research paper, The Nervous Trader: What trader uncertainty tells us about the services we build here.