How to Scrape 1688.com Product Listings (Step-by-Step Guide)

If you want to scrape 1688.com product listings for wholesale sourcing, price intelligence, or supplier research, this guide covers everything you need. You will learn what data you can extract from 1688, how to bypass its Chinese-only access restrictions, and how to turn raw listings into actionable B2B sourcing intelligence — including the tiered volume pricing that makes 1688 so valuable in the first place.

Why Scrape 1688.com Product Data?

1688.com is Alibaba Group's domestic Chinese B2B wholesale marketplace and the original source for the majority of products you will find on Alibaba.com. While Alibaba.com is the export-facing storefront aimed at international buyers, 1688 is where Chinese factories list their goods for domestic resellers — usually at a fraction of the export price.

That makes 1688 one of the most valuable data sources in global sourcing. Anyone serious about wholesale procurement, arbitrage, or supplier research eventually wants to look "upstream" of Alibaba.com to see what suppliers actually charge their domestic customers. The catch: 1688 is Chinese-only by design, gated against non-CN IPs, and full of anti-bot defenses that make manual or naïve scraping painful.

Businesses scrape 1688 data for several reasons:

• Wholesale price intelligence — discover the true factory-direct price of products, not just their Alibaba.com export markup
• Supplier discovery — find manufacturers and trading companies upstream of the Alibaba.com middlemen
• Tiered pricing analysis — model unit economics for different order volumes using 1688's volume-discount ladders
• Cross-platform arbitrage — compare 1688 prices to Alibaba.com, AliExpress, or Western retail to identify margin opportunities
• Product trend research — track which products are gaining traction in the Chinese domestic market before they hit Western marketplaces
• Competitive sourcing intelligence — understand what your competitors might be paying for their inventory

Manually browsing 1688 and copy-pasting product data is impractical even before you account for the language barrier and IP restrictions. Automation is the only realistic approach.

What Data You Can Extract from 1688.com

The 1688.com Listings Scraper extracts structured data from both search results and full product detail pages. Here are the key fields you can collect:

This is exactly the kind of structured B2B data sourcing teams need — pricing with volume tiers, MOQs, full supplier identification, logistics, and after-sales policy — all in a single export.

Common Use Cases for 1688 Data

Wholesale Price Discovery

1688 is where domestic Chinese buyers source product, which means its prices are typically the closest you can get to the factory-direct cost without negotiating with a manufacturer directly. Scraping product data lets you discover the true wholesale floor for any category and benchmark every other price you encounter (Alibaba.com, AliExpress, Amazon) against it.

Supplier Discovery Upstream of Alibaba.com

Many Alibaba.com sellers are trading companies that resell goods sourced from 1688 factories. Scraping 1688 lets you skip the middleman and find the original manufacturer — often using the same product images or near-identical titles you see on Alibaba.com.

Tiered Pricing & Order-Size Modeling

1688's killer feature for sourcing is its tiered price ladder — the unit price drops as your order grows. Extracting these tiers as structured data lets you build accurate landed-cost models for different MOQ scenarios, run break-even calculations, and identify the order size at which a product becomes viable.

Cross-Platform Arbitrage Research

Combine 1688 data with data from Alibaba and AliExpress on the same SKUs to spot pricing gaps. Margin opportunities are easiest to spot when you can see the domestic, export, and retail prices side by side.

Trend Spotting Before Products Reach the West

Products often trend on 1688 months before they show up on Western marketplaces. Tracking sold counts, "wantBuy" signals, and category-level supplier growth on 1688 is an early indicator of what will hit Amazon, TikTok Shop, or your dropshipping niche next.

Challenges of Scraping 1688 Manually

Before jumping into the tutorial, it is worth understanding why scraping 1688 is harder than scraping most other marketplaces:

• CN-only access — 1688 blocks non-Chinese IPs aggressively. Without a residential CN proxy, you will see block pages from request #1
• Slider CAPTCHAs and _____tmd_____ blocks — after ~5–15 hits from the same IP, 1688 throws a CAPTCHA or _____tmd_____ interstitial that breaks naïve scrapers
• Chinese-only content — product titles, attributes, and seller info are all in Chinese. Search results for English keywords are sparse compared to native Chinese terms
• Two different sites — 1688 has a desktop and mobile site with different layouts and anti-bot profiles. The mobile site is more scraper-friendly but still rate-limited
• Hex-encoded search URLs — the search URL hex-encodes the query, which trips up most off-the-shelf scrapers that just URL-encode keywords
• Complex data structure — tiered prices, attribute matrices, and nested logistics fields require careful parsing
• Maintenance burden — like any major marketplace, 1688 updates its frontend often, breaking custom scrapers that are not actively maintained

Building and maintaining your own 1688 scraper is a serious engineering project. For most use cases, a pre-built, maintained solution is far more practical.

Step-by-Step: How to Scrape 1688.com Product Listings

Here is how to scrape 1688 product data using the 1688.com Listings Scraper on Apify.

Step 1 — Choose Your Keywords or Offer IDs

The scraper supports two input modes:

• Keyword search — paginate any 1688 search query. Chinese keywords (e.g. 蓝牙耳机) work best, but English (bluetooth earphones) is accepted
• Direct offer lookup — if you already know which products you want, pass their offer IDs (e.g. 782846321577) to skip the search step entirely

You can mix and match — many users start with broad keyword searches to discover offers, then re-scrape specific offer IDs later in detail mode.

Step 2 — Configure the Scraper Input

Head to the 1688.com Listings Scraper on Apify and configure your run:

1. Enter your search keywords (Chinese preferred) or specific offer IDs
2. Set maxItems to cap the total rows returned across all keywords
3. Choose how many search pages to walk per keyword with maxPagesPerKeyword (each page returns up to 19 offers)
4. Toggle includeDetails:
   • Off (shallow mode) — fast, cheap, returns core listing fields per offer
   • On (detail mode) — slower, returns full tiered prices, attribute matrices, logistics, and seller info
5. Leave the proxy configuration on its default — Apify Residential, country CN

Example input:

{
  "keywords": ["iphone case", "蓝牙耳机"],
  "maxItems": 200,
  "maxPagesPerKeyword": 5,
  "includeDetails": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"],
    "apifyProxyCountry": "CN"
  }
}

Step 3 — Run the Scraper

Once started, the scraper will:

• Search 1688 with your keywords across the mobile site
• Walk pagination automatically up to maxPagesPerKeyword
• Rotate Apify Residential sessions automatically when 1688 throws a _____tmd_____ block
• Follow each search hit to its detail page if includeDetails: true
• Extract structured data including tiered prices, attributes, logistics, and supplier info
• Store everything in a clean, typed dataset

Processing time depends on the volume of data requested. Most runs complete in a few minutes.

Step 4 — Export Your Results

When the scraper finishes, export your data in the format you need:

• JSON — ideal for developers building integrations or sourcing pipelines
• CSV — perfect for spreadsheet analysis or importing into procurement tools
• API — access results programmatically via the Apify API for automated workflows

Ready to try it? Run the 1688.com Listings Scraper on Apify and get your first dataset in minutes.

Example Output (Real Data Preview)

Here is what the actual output looks like with includeDetails: true. Each product returns a structured JSON object:

{
  "offerId": "782846321577",
  "title": "潮牌金属适用iphone15promax手机壳苹果16pro立体十字架个性17air",
  "priceFrom": 12.8,
  "priceTo": 27,
  "unit": "个",
  "minOrderQuantity": 1,
  "tierPrices": [
    { "price": 12.8, "beginAmount": 1 },
    { "price": 27, "beginAmount": 1 }
  ],
  "soldCount": "4029",
  "wantBuy": "3524",
  "attributes": [
    { "name": "材质", "value": "仿皮" },
    { "name": "品牌", "value": "苹果" },
    { "name": "适用机型", "value": "苹果" }
  ],
  "images": [
    "https://cbu01.alicdn.com/img/ibank/O1CN0192dePV1p7PFGqWJGK_!!2831885313-0-cib.jpg"
  ],
  "services": ["7天无理由退货", "晚发必赔"],
  "logistics": {
    "location": "广东广州",
    "deliveryLimit": "承诺48小时发货·常发韵达快递",
    "unitWeight": 0
  },
  "sellerCompany": "广州市威卡诺塑料制品有限公司",
  "sellerLoginId": "艾诺奇1688",
  "sellerMemberId": "b2b-2831885313c05f4",
  "sellerWinportUrl": "https://winport.m.1688.com/page/index.html?memberId=b2b-2831885313c05f4",
  "location": "广东广州",
  "url": "https://m.1688.com/offer/782846321577.html",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-12T11:00:00.000Z"
}

Key things to notice:

• Tiered prices as first-class data — tierPrices gives you the actual volume-discount ladder, not just a headline price
• Demand signals — soldCount and wantBuy show actual traction for each product
• Full attribute matrix — material, brand, compatibility, and other category-specific attributes as structured key-value pairs
• Direct supplier identification — company name, member ID, and Winport store URL for outreach and vetting
• Logistics specifics — dispatch SLA, carrier, location, and unit weight for landed-cost modeling
• After-sales policies — return and refund policies surfaced as a list

When includeDetails: false, you get a lighter row per offer with the core fields (offerId, title, priceFrom, soldCount, location, repurchaseRate, sellerTenure, image, url) — useful for shallow market surveys before committing to a full detail run.

Try the 1688.com Listings Scraper now — no coding required.

Automating Sourcing Research

For ongoing sourcing intelligence, you do not want to run the scraper manually every time you need fresh data. The Apify platform supports full automation:

Scheduled Runs

Set up recurring scrapes on any schedule — daily, weekly, or monthly. The scraper runs automatically and stores results in a dataset you can access anytime. Daily runs work well for tracking volatile categories or spotting new offers; weekly runs are sufficient for general supplier research.

API Integration

Use the Apify API to trigger scraper runs programmatically and retrieve results. This lets you integrate 1688 data into your existing sourcing workflows:

• Feed new offers into your product research pipeline
• Trigger alerts when a tracked offer's tiered price drops below a threshold
• Build dashboards that update with fresh wholesale pricing data
• Connect to tools like Zapier, Make, or custom data pipelines

Cross-Platform Comparison Pipelines

Pair 1688 data with Alibaba on the same keyword set to see the domestic-vs-export markup for the same SKU. Add AliExpress to round out the picture with retail pricing. The three together give you the full margin stack from factory floor to Western consumer.

Node.js Example

For a complete working example showing how to call this scraper from Node.js, see the GitHub repository.

Webhooks

Configure webhooks to get notified when a scraper run completes. This is useful for event-driven architectures where you want to process new product data as soon as it is available.

Using 1688 Data for Sourcing Intelligence

1688 data goes far beyond simple product discovery. It is one of the highest-signal datasets in global B2B sourcing.

Reverse-Engineering Alibaba.com Listings

Many Alibaba.com sellers are middlemen reselling 1688 product. By searching 1688 for the same product images or near-identical titles, you can often find the original manufacturer and shave a significant markup off your sourcing cost.

Tiered Price Modeling

Use the tierPrices field to build automatic break-even models. Plot unit cost vs. order volume across many suppliers in the same category to find the supplier with the best volume curve, not just the lowest headline price.

Supplier Tenure & Reliability Signals

Combine sellerTenure, repurchaseRate, and soldCount to filter for established, high-trust suppliers. New listings with no track record are easy to spot and exclude before you even pick up a sample.

Category-Level Market Mapping

Scrape every offer for a keyword (e.g. 蓝牙耳机) and analyze the supplier-location distribution. Most Chinese product categories are geographically concentrated — Bluetooth earphones in 广东 (Guangdong), apparel in 浙江 (Zhejiang), and so on. Knowing the cluster makes factory visits and direct outreach far more efficient.

Does 1688.com Provide an API?

1688.com does not offer a public API for general product listing data:

What's Available

• Some partner-level API access exists through the Alibaba Open Platform, but it requires partner approval and business verification
• Access is limited to specific approved use cases — generic product scraping for sourcing research is not one of them
• The API does not expose the same depth of data as the public site, particularly tiered prices and attribute matrices
• Rate limits significantly restrict the volume of data you can pull

What the API Misses

The official channels miss what makes 1688 valuable in the first place: the volume-discount ladders, the full attribute matrix, the supplier reputation signals, and the demand-side metrics like sold counts and "wantBuy" interest. These are surfaced in the public mobile UI and extracted by the scraper, but absent from any official feed.

The 1688.com Listings Scraper gives you a practical alternative — structured product data from any search query or offer ID, without API approval or access restrictions.

Why Use a 1688 Scraper Instead of Building One

Building a custom 1688 scraper sounds straightforward until you start dealing with the reality:

• CN proxy infrastructure — you need a steady supply of high-quality Chinese residential IPs. Public proxy lists will not work; commercial CN residential pools are expensive and require careful session management
• Anti-bot defenses — _____tmd_____ blocks, slider CAPTCHAs, and request fingerprinting need active countermeasures. Tuning these takes weeks of trial and error
• Hex URL encoding & mobile-vs-desktop site quirks — the search endpoint encodes queries in hex and the mobile and desktop sites behave differently. Naïve URL encoding silently returns empty results
• Frontend churn — 1688 updates its layout frequently. Every update breaks selectors, requiring immediate fixes
• Chinese-language parsing — extracting attributes, tier prices, and after-sales policies correctly requires understanding the page structure in Chinese
• Opportunity cost — every hour spent fixing your scraper is an hour not spent on sourcing decisions, supplier negotiations, or growing your business

Unless you have very specific requirements that no existing tool can meet, using a maintained scraper lets you focus on what to do with the data instead of how to collect it.

Try the 1688.com Listings Scraper

The 1688.com Listings Scraper extracts structured data from 1688 product listings — offer IDs, Chinese titles, tiered prices, MOQs, sold counts, attribute matrices, images, after-sales policies, logistics, and full supplier information.

What you get:

• Structured JSON or CSV output ready for procurement tools or analysis
• Tiered wholesale prices as first-class data — not buried in unstructured text
• Full supplier identification (company, member ID, Winport URL) for direct outreach
• Pay-Per-Event pricing: $1.00 / 1,000 shallow rows, $4.00 / 1,000 detail rows — you only pay for results
• Built-in Apify Residential CN proxy with automatic session rotation
• Scheduled runs and API access for ongoing sourcing intelligence
• No coding, no proxy management, no scraper maintenance

Start scraping 1688 now — your first run takes less than 5 minutes to set up.

If you are building a sourcing data pipeline, combine 1688 data with other e-commerce sources like Alibaba for the export-side markup, AliExpress for retail price comparison, or DHgate for an alternative China-to-Western wholesale channel.

Legal and Ethical Considerations

Web scraping occupies a well-established legal space, but responsible practice matters:

• Public data only — the 1688 scraper extracts publicly visible product information that anyone can see by visiting 1688.com. No login or authentication is required
• Respect rate limits — the scraper is designed to make requests at a reasonable pace and rotate sessions to avoid overloading 1688's servers
• No misuse — use collected data for legitimate business purposes like sourcing research, price monitoring, and competitive analysis. Do not use the data to create counterfeit listings or mislead buyers
• Compliance — if you operate in the EU or California, ensure your data handling complies with GDPR or CCPA. This primarily applies to how you store and process the data, not the collection itself

1688 product listings are public marketplace data — they are designed to be found by buyers. Scraping this data for sourcing and procurement is aligned with the platform's intended purpose.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is 1688.com and how is it different from Alibaba.com?

1688.com is Alibaba Group's domestic Chinese B2B wholesale marketplace, while Alibaba.com is its international export-focused counterpart. 1688 is where Chinese factories list products for the domestic market, usually at significantly lower prices than the export-oriented Alibaba.com — most products you see on Alibaba.com are sourced through 1688.com first. The site is in Chinese, prices are in CNY, and access is restricted from non-Chinese IPs.

Is scraping 1688.com legal?

Scraping publicly available product data from 1688.com is generally legal. The listings are visible to anyone who visits the site without logging in. However, you should always use the data responsibly, comply with local privacy regulations, and avoid overloading 1688's servers with excessive requests.

Does 1688.com provide an API?

1688.com does not offer a public API for general product listing data. Some partner-level access exists through Alibaba's open platform, but it requires approval, business verification, and does not provide the same depth of data available on the public site — particularly tiered wholesale prices, attribute matrices, and supplier-level information. A web scraper is the practical alternative.

Why do I need a Chinese residential proxy to scrape 1688?

1688.com aggressively blocks non-Chinese IPs because it is built for the domestic Chinese market. Without a CN residential proxy, most requests return a block page or empty results. The 1688.com Listings Scraper ships with Apify Residential proxy preconfigured to country=CN, so this is handled automatically.

Can I search in English on 1688.com?

Yes, the scraper accepts English keywords, but Chinese terms return significantly richer results because 1688 is built for Chinese buyers. For example, 蓝牙耳机 will return far more relevant listings than bluetooth earphones. If you do not speak Chinese, translate your keywords first for the best results.

What does "tiered pricing" mean on 1688.com?

Tiered pricing is 1688's headline feature — products are sold with volume discounts where the unit price drops as you order more units. For example, 1–9 units might cost ¥27 each, 10–99 units ¥18 each, and 100+ units ¥12.80 each. The scraper extracts these tiers as structured data so you can model bulk-order economics directly.

About the Author

This guide was written by Piotr, a software engineer with hands-on experience building and maintaining web scrapers at scale. He develops and maintains a suite of data extraction tools on the Apify platform, helping businesses automate their data collection workflows.