1688.com is the wholesale marketplace that Chinese shops and resellers buy from. Many of the factories you find on Alibaba.com or AliExpress also sell there, often for less, because 1688 is built for buyers inside China. If you source products for dropshipping, Amazon FBA or your own shop, 1688 is where you see what a product really costs at the factory gate.
The trouble is getting that information out. The site is in Chinese, search works best with Chinese words, one keyword brings hundreds of offers, and copying prices into a spreadsheet by hand takes an afternoon.
This guide shows a faster way: 1688 Product Scraper, a ready-made scraper on Apify that turns 1688 search results and offer pages into a table you can sort, translate and compare. No 1688 account, no browser extension, no proxy of your own.
What you get
For each search result:
- title, and the title in English if you ask for it
- price in CNY and in US dollars
- price by quantity (the price breaks for larger orders)
- units sold and repeat-buyer rate
- supplier name, shop link, years on 1688, province and city
- picture, link, and whether the result is an ad
For each offer you open in full, about 100 fields:
- the lowest and highest price, price by quantity, smallest order
- every variant with its price and stock
- units sold, orders in the last 30 days, reviews and rating
- where it ships from, postage, promised dispatch time
- the supplier card: company name, years on 1688, star level, service scores, badges such as factory or TrustPass
- dropshipping terms, and the description pictures
Step 1: write your keyword in Chinese
1688 search works best with Chinese words. Translate the product name into Simplified Chinese (Google Translate is fine) and check that the first results look right. A few examples:
| Product | Keyword |
|---|---|
| Phone case | 手机壳 |
| Bluetooth earphones | 蓝牙耳机 |
| LED strip lights | 灯带 |
No keyword, only a photo of the product? 1688 Image Search finds the 1688 offers that look like it, with the same price and supplier fields. Step by step: How to find the 1688 factory behind a product photo.
Step 2: search and get a supplier list
Open the ready-made task Find 1688 suppliers for phone cases, replace 手机壳 with your keyword and press Start. You get up to 180 offers per keyword (three pages of 60; that is as far as 1688 lets a visitor who is not logged in go). You can put several keywords in one run.
Export the result as CSV or Excel, or open it in Google Sheets.
Step 3: make a shortlist
A few columns do most of the work:
- Price and price by quantity: what you would really pay at your order size.
- Units sold: a rough sign that the offer is real and moving.
- Repeat-buyer rate: buyers who came back. Higher is usually better.
- Years on 1688 and province / city: older shops in the regions known for your product (for example Guangdong for electronics) are a good place to start.
Sort, filter out the ads if you want, and keep the 10 to 30 offers worth a closer look.
Step 4: open the shortlist in full
Paste the offer links of your shortlist into the same scraper and switch on the full details. The ready-made task Get 1688 Bluetooth earphone listings with supplier ratings shows what that looks like: price tiers, variants and stock, 30-day orders, the supplier card, ratings and dropshipping terms for each offer.
In our test runs, 100 full offers took a little over two minutes.
Step 5: get the titles in English
Titles and attributes come in Chinese, as 1688 shows them. Turn on English titles and every row gets title_en, a machine translation of the title, for $1.00 per 1,000 rows.
If you would rather not pay for it, Google Sheets translates a column for free. If the title is in column B:
=GOOGLETRANSLATE(B2, "zh-CN", "en")
Fill it down and you have English titles next to the original ones.
Step 6: watch prices over time
If you buy the same products again and again, run the search on a schedule (for example every Monday) and give the run a watch list name. The first run returns everything. Every later run with the same name returns only offers that are new or whose price, title or state changed, with the old value next to the new one. Rows that did not change are not stored and not charged.
The task Compare wholesale prices of LED strip lights on 1688 is a good starting point for a price watch.
What it costs
You pay per row the scraper stores, nothing for rows it could not read:
| Row | Price per 1,000 (Apify free plan) |
|---|---|
| A full offer | $3.00 |
| A search result | $0.50 |
| An English title (add-on) | $1.00 |
One keyword read to the end (180 results) costs $0.09. Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month, which is about 1,600 full offers. On Apify's paid plans the prices per row are lower.
Limits worth knowing
- Up to 180 search results per keyword. For more, use several narrower keywords.
- Text comes in Chinese. Prices come in CNY and in US dollars, at the European Central Bank's rate of the day.
- Descriptions on 1688 are mostly pictures, so the description text is often short.
- The supplier's legal details (registration number, capital) are on a separate page and are not read; the row links to it.
- 1688 sometimes refuses searches for a while. The scraper then waits and tries again; if the refusal lasts, it stops, keeps what it read and charges nothing for the rest.
Try it
The scraper is 1688 Product Scraper on Apify. If a field you need is missing, write on its Issues tab with the offer link.
1688 is a trademark of its owner. The scraper is not affiliated with or endorsed by 1688.com or Alibaba Group.
Top comments (4)
Handy workflow. One tip for the shortlist step: 1688 prices are domestic factory-gate prices, so before you fall in love with a number, ask the supplier whether it includes export-grade packaging, an invoice that allows export, and the cost to reach your forwarder. Those three lines often erase half the apparent savings. Also order one sample from your top two or three, not just the cheapest, since the sample tells you more about consistency than any rating. Spreadsheets are great, but a $20 sample has never once lied to me.
Good point, thanks. The scraper only gives the factory-gate side: price by quantity, the smallest order and the supplier’s city, so packaging, export invoice and the trip to the forwarder still have to be asked. And agreed on samples from the top two or three: they tell you more than any rating.
Solid write-up — the scraper side is clean. One caveat if anyone points it at fabric instead of finished goods: price tiers on 1688 fabric listings are frequently nominal. Plenty of mills post a low MOQ price for a construction they don't actually hold as stock, and the number that matters only shows up once you ask for weight per square metre, width and fibre composition — none of which are in the scraped fields.
Two tweaks I'd make to the shortlist logic:
units soldis close to useless for fabric. The counter mixes metres and kilograms across listings, so 3000 sold can mean 3000 metres of one colourway, or three tonnes of greige. Check the unit per listing before you trust the ranking.repeat-buyer rategets inflated by trading companies that keep re-buying swatches from the same mill. Pair it with the factory badge and the province — fabric production clusters are geographically concentrated, so a trading company sitting outside a cluster is almost always reselling with a markup.Last one: on fabric offers the description images are the spec sheet — colour cards, close-up weave shots, test reports. OCRing those gets you more than the text fields ever will.
Thanks, this is really useful from the mill side. Two of your points can already be checked in the data. Every offer row has a
unitfield (个, 米, 千克 and so on), andsold_textkeeps 1688's own unit, so you can drop the listings that count in another unit before you rank by units sold. With full offer rows,description_imageslists the description pictures, so the colour cards and test reports are there to OCR. The point about trading companies outside the fabric clusters is a good filter, and the province field makes it easy to apply.