1688 Scraper: Wholesale Prices & Suppliers in 2026

Where the wholesale price lives

Most sourcing starts on Alibaba.com or AliExpress. Upstream of both sits 1688.com, Alibaba’s domestic Chinese B2B wholesale marketplace: suppliers selling to Chinese buyers, in Chinese, priced in yuan, with quantity breaks on the listings. Many cross-border sellers buy there at wholesale prices.

For an English-speaking importer, Amazon seller or private-label brand, 1688 is the closest public view of factory-direct cost. The hard part is reading it at scale.

What you can extract

One record per offer:

• Price range in CNY and tiered quantity pricing: each price break with its start and end quantity
• Minimum order quantity, stock, units sold and unit weight
• Variant options: every color and size, with per-variant stock and price on demand
• Shipping: origin, fee, delivery days and free-shipping flag
• Trade flags: dropshipping support, customization and cross-border trade
• After-sales guarantees and buyer protections
• Demand: monthly sales and 30-day sales value
• Supplier: company name, seller type, location, verification, repeat-buyer and response rates, certifications and service scores
• Reviews: total, rating, good rate, sentiment tags and sample reviews with the variant each buyer bought

The technical challenge

1688 is built for domestic buyers:

• Language: the catalog is indexed in Chinese. English keywords work, but 蓝牙耳机 returns far more suppliers than “wireless earbuds”.
• Pricing structure: the headline price is a range; the real unit cost depends on which tier your order quantity falls into.
• Scattered trust signals: seller type, repeat-buyer rate, guarantees and reviews sit in different parts of each listing.
• Access: keyword search needs residential proxies.

Once extracted, Chinese titles still need mapping to your own product taxonomy, a job well suited to LLM-powered extraction.

DIY or a ready-made Actor?

Our 1688 Scraper on Apify takes keywords in English or Chinese, sorted by relevance, best-selling or price, with up to 2,000 offers per keyword, or a list of offer IDs. Supplier details and the review summary come with every offer; the per-variant stock and price matrix is opt-in. A residential proxy is selected by default and no 1688 account is needed. Pay-per-result at about $0.004 per product.

A practical workflow

1. Search in Chinese: use the terms Chinese buyers type, and sort by best-selling to start from products with real order volume.
2. Read the price breaks: compare unit cost at your target quantity using the tiered quantityPrices, not the headline price; the break point is often lower than the listing suggests.
3. Filter suppliers: keep offers with a strong repeat-buyer rate, a high good rate and the guarantees you need, then turn on the variant matrix for the shortlist only.
4. Monitor the shortlist: rerun the offer IDs weekly to track price, stock and minimum-order changes; the same discipline as e-commerce price monitoring, applied upstream.

Use cases that pay off

• Supplier sourcing: shortlists ranked by price break, minimum order and repeat-buyer rate.
• Landed-cost models: tiered unit cost, variants and unit weight feed a margin model before you import a single unit.
• Dropshipping catalogs: low-MOQ offers with dropshipping support and the exact colors and sizes available.
• Retail benchmarking: set 1688 wholesale cost against JD.com retail prices for the same category to see how much room a product leaves.

The legal boundaries

• Public data only: the scraper reads public product data and bypasses no login, paywall or CAPTCHA.
• Some personal data: supplier contact names and reviewer nicknames count as personal data; handle them under GDPR, CCPA or PIPL as relevant.
• Terms of service: 1688’s terms apply to how you use the data.
• Verify before ordering: scraped data is informational; confirm price, minimum order and specifications with the supplier before you wire a deposit.