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.