Online business platforms and international trade

International trade is subject to information incompleteness. Firms must therefore engage in a costly search process to find business partners. Online platforms can reduce these search costs and thereby favor firms’ overall exports. We examine whether this is actually the case and the underlying mechanisms thereof. In so doing, we combine detailed information on firms’ participation in a free, purely informational online platform and customs data covering the entire universe of a developing country's export transactions over a long time period. We apply various estimation strategies on these data, including specifically the use of how many visits firms received to their profiles as a source of identifying variation. Consistent with its interpretation as a search cost-reducing mechanism, our estimates suggest that joining the platform resulted in increased firms’ total exports, particularly of those firms that are small or had no digital presence, of differentiated products, and to less familiar destinations.