Alibaba RFQ & Buying Leads

See what buyers around the world are trying to source right now. This actor turns Alibaba's public RFQ board into a clean lead table: every live buying lead as one row, with what the buyer wants, how many units, which country they are buying into, which industry it belongs to, how fresh it is, how many quote slots are still free and when the lead closes. For a manufacturer, a trading company or a sourcing agency, that is an inbound sales pipeline you can filter, sort and hand straight to the people who answer it. No account and no login are needed — pick your markets, press start, and the leads arrive ready to work.

What you can do with it

• Fill a sales pipeline every morning. Take everything posted in the last hour or the last 24 hours in your industry, and answer the freshest leads before your competitors see them.
• Target the markets you actually ship to. Keep only buyers in the United States, Germany, Brazil or any mix of 102 markets, and route each market to the salesperson who covers it.
• Answer only what is still answerable. Every lead carries how many quote slots are left, so you can drop the ones that are already full and spend your time on the ones that are open.
• Size real demand before you invest. Count how many buyers are looking for your product line this fortnight, in which countries, and for what quantities — a live demand signal, not a forecast.
• Watch your competition. Switch on the competition option and each lead shows how many suppliers already answered, where they are based, their trade badges and how long they have been paying members.
• Feed a CRM or a sheet. Every field is a plain column — export to Excel, Google Sheets, CSV or JSON in one click, or push it straight into your CRM.

What you get

One row per buying lead. Abridged real example, with the optional exact dates and competition attached:

{
  "rfqId": "1846064064",
  "url": "https://sourcing.alibaba.com/rfq_detail.htm?id=1846064064",
  "subject": "Solid Wood 3-Seater Sofa with High Backrest and Armrests",
  "subjectIsShortened": false,
  "description": "I am looking to purchase a 1-piece wooden 3-seater sofa for home use.The focus is on solid wood construction and a classic design,similar to the styles shown in the images provided. ...",
  "descriptionIsShortened": true,
  "buyerCountry": "United Arab Emirates",
  "buyerCountryCode": "AE",
  "quantity": 1,
  "quantityUnit": "piece",
  "postedLabel": "1 days ago",
  "postedAt": "2026-08-08T20:25:59.000Z",
  "expiresAt": "2026-08-22T20:25:59.000Z",
  "expiresInLabel": "13D 8H",
  "quotesRemaining": 6,
  "extraQuoteSeats": 5,
  "quotesReceived": 4,
  "maxQuotes": 10,
  "qualityTier": 3,
  "qualityTierMax": 3,
  "hasAttachments": true,
  "buyerTags": ["emailConfirm", "typically_replies"],
  "status": "approved",
  "isHighValueLead": false,
  "isDetailEnriched": true,
  "quotingSupplierCount": 4,
  "quotingSupplierLocations": ["India", "China, Guangdong", "China, Jiangsu"],
  "quotingSupplierNamesWithheld": true,
  "quotingSuppliers": [
    {
      "quotedAt": "2026-08-08T11:23:55.000Z",
      "supplierNameMask": "K*******T",
      "supplierNameIsWithheld": true,
      "supplierLocation": "India",
      "supplierBusinessType": null,
      "supplierIsGoldMember": true,
      "supplierIsAssessed": false,
      "supplierPaidYears": 4
    }
  ],
  "firstQuoteAt": "2026-08-08T04:26:09.000Z",
  "latestQuoteAt": "2026-08-08T11:23:55.000Z",
  "matchedFilter": "whole board",
  "collectedAt": "2026-08-09T20:48:11.402Z"
}

Input reference

Field	Type	Default	What it does
searchTerms	list of text	—	Words that must appear in the lead, such as solar panel. Each term is collected on its own, so several terms multiply your coverage. Up to 20 per run. Leave empty for the whole board.
buyerCountries	list of select	—	Keep only leads posted by buyers in these markets — 102 to pick from. Several markets are collected separately and add up. Leave empty for every market.
categories	list of select	—	Keep only leads filed under these industries, from the site's 50. Accepts the industry name or its number. Leave empty for every industry.
postedWithin	select	Any time	Freshness window: last hour, 3 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, 2 days, 3 days, 7 days, or older than 7 days.
postingLanguage	select	Any language	Keep only leads written in one language — useful when your team answers in one.
qualityTier	select	Any tier	The site grades leads into tiers. Silver and copper are the two published openly.
onlyOpenRequests	true/false	true	Skip leads that are already closed to new quotes.
onlyWithAttachments	true/false	false	Keep only leads where the buyer attached drawings, specifications or photos.
onlyDetailedQuotesWanted	true/false	false	Keep only leads where the buyer asked for a full quotation rather than an indication.
newestFirst	true/false	true	Put the most recently posted leads at the top.
minQuotesRemaining	number	0	Skip leads with fewer than this many free quote slots (0–10).
addExactDates	true/false	false	Add the exact moment each lead was posted and closes, how long is left, and how many quotes are already in. Billed as an enriched lead.
includeQuoteCompetition	true/false	false	Attach the suppliers already competing for the lead — location, trade badges, business type, years as a paying member and when each quote landed. Billed as an enriched lead.
maxEnrichedLeads	number	1000	Ceiling on how many leads get the extra detail above (maximum 20,000), so a big run cannot bill more than you expect. Leads past the ceiling are still collected, just without those fields. Set it to 0 and no lead is enriched and nothing is billed for enrichment, whatever the two switches above say.
includeBuyerIdentity	true/false	false	Include the name and picture of the person who posted the lead. That is personal data about an identified individual, so it is left out unless you switch it on.
maxResults	number	200	How many leads to collect in total (maximum 50,000).
autoSliceBy	select	By buyer market	When you ask for more than one filter combination publishes, split the job by buyer market (widest coverage) or by industry (best when you sell into one sector). Choose "do not split" to stop at the single-combination ceiling.
maxPagesPerCombination	number	250	A shallower ceiling per filter combination (1–250). Lower it for a fast, broad sample across many markets.
country	select	United States	Which country version of the site to read. The lead board is the same worldwide, so this rarely changes the result.
parallelLeads	number	2	How many leads to work on at the same time (1–4).

Output fields

Field	Type	Description
rfqId	text	The lead's stable identifier on the site. Safe to store and to match on between runs.
url	text	Direct link to the lead.
subject	text	What the buyer wants, in their own words.
subjectIsShortened	true/false	true when the board cut the title short. Roughly two in five titles are, so this tells you when what you see is not the whole title.
description	text	The buyer's summary of the job, as the board publishes it.
descriptionIsShortened	true/false	true when the board cut the summary short. The full text is not published anywhere public, so nothing is invented to fill the gap.
buyerCountry, buyerCountryCode	text	The market the buyer is buying into. UK and GB are normalised to one value.
quantity, quantityUnit	number / text	How much the buyer wants, and the unit they typed. The unit is in the buyer's own language, exactly as posted.
postedLabel	text	The site's own wording for the lead's age, such as 1 days ago.
postedAt	text	Exact moment the lead was posted. Filled only when you switch on the exact dates.
expiresAt, expiresInLabel	text	Exact moment the lead closes to new quotes, and how long is left. Filled only when you switch on the exact dates.
quotesRemaining	number	Quote slots still free on this lead.
extraQuoteSeats	number	Additional slots the site can release beyond the standard allowance.
quotesReceived, maxQuotes	number	Quotes already accepted and the total the lead allows. Filled only with the exact dates switched on.
qualityTier, qualityTierMax	number	The site's own grade for the lead, and the top of that scale.
hasAttachments	true/false	Whether the buyer attached drawings, specifications or photos.
buyerTags	list	Trust signals the site publishes about the buyer, such as a confirmed address or a habit of replying.
tierTags	list	The site's own grading labels for the lead, passed through unchanged.
imageUrl	text	Reference picture the buyer attached, when there is one.
relevanceScore	number	The site's own ranking figure for the lead's position in the list you asked for.
status	text	Whether the lead is live on the board. Filled only with the exact dates switched on.
isHighValueLead	true/false	The site's own flag for a lead it considers high value. Filled only with the exact dates switched on.
isDetailEnriched	true/false	Whether the extra detail was successfully attached to this row.
quotingSuppliers	list	The suppliers already competing, one entry each: quotedAt, quotedAtLabel, supplierNameMask, supplierNameIsWithheld, supplierLocation, supplierBusinessType, supplierIsGoldMember, supplierIsAssessed, supplierPaidYears.
supplierNameMask	text	Not a company name. The site publishes competitors as a mask such as K*******T, and that mask is what comes back. Everything else about the competitor is real.
quotingSupplierCount	number	How many suppliers have already answered.
quotingSupplierLocations	list	Where those suppliers are based, de-duplicated.
quotingSupplierNamesWithheld	true/false	Confirms the competitor names were withheld by the site rather than missed.
firstQuoteAt, latestQuoteAt	text	When the first and most recent competing quotes landed.
buyerName, buyerPhotoId	text	The person who posted the lead. Present only when you switch on the buyer identity option.
matchedFilter	text	Which filter combination produced this row — the market, industry or search term it came from.
collectedAt	text	When the row was collected.

Pricing

You pay per lead returned. The extra detail is a separate, optional charge, and only on leads where the detail actually arrived.

What you pay for	Price
Each buying lead	$8.00 per 1,000
Each lead with the extra detail attached	$4.00 per 1,000

Worked example. A daily prospecting run of 200 fresh leads in your industry costs $1.60. Turn on the exact dates and the competition for all 200 and the run costs $2.40. A 1,000-lead weekly sweep across five markets costs $8.00, or $12.00 with the extra detail on every lead. Leads that are filtered out are never charged.

Limits & what this actor cannot do

• The board is a rolling two-week window. Nothing older than fourteen days is published, and a lead disappears fourteen days after it was posted. This actor returns live leads; it cannot reach back into history, and no archive of past leads exists to be collected.
• Any single combination of filters publishes at most 5,000 leads. Asking for more is not refused — the job is automatically split across markets or industries so the total can be reached, and the split is printed in the run log before any work is done. The one thing that cannot be done is to pull more than 5,000 from one unfiltered sweep.
• Long titles and summaries are published shortened. The board cuts both and marks them with a trailing ellipsis — around two in five titles and four in five summaries. The complete text is not published publicly anywhere, so each row carries what is published plus a flag saying there is more. Nothing is guessed to fill it in, and no row is silently presented as complete when it is not.
• Competitor company names are withheld by the source. Suppliers who already quoted come back as a mask such as K*******T. That is the site's own masking, not a gap in collection — their country and province, business type, trade badges, paying-member years and quote timing are all real and are all returned. No name is ever reconstructed or guessed.
• The buyer's own company profile and contact details are not public. The site keeps them behind a members-only wall, so they are not returned. What you get is the person's display name and picture, and only if you ask for them.
• The site's top lead grades are members-only. Silver and copper are the two tiers published openly; the higher grades cannot be filtered on without an account, so they are not offered as an option.
• Exact posting and closing moments are an optional extra. Without them each lead still carries the site's own wording for its age, such as 3 days ago.
• The headline "leads found" figure the site shows is an estimate. It moves by hundreds within a single minute, so it is never reported as a count and never used to decide when a job is finished.
• Everything here is a snapshot. Quote slots fill, leads close and new ones appear continuously; two runs an hour apart will not return the same table.
• Speed depends on the size of the job and on the source site's own response times. No fixed throughput is promised.
• The source site's terms govern automated access. You are responsible for using the data lawfully and in line with those terms, and for handling any personal data — including a buyer's name — in line with applicable privacy law.

FAQ

Do I need an account on Alibaba? No. Nothing is signed in to and nothing is bought.

Does it need my login or password? No. There is no place to enter one, and none is ever used.

Can I schedule it? Yes — and this is the actor most worth scheduling. Save your markets and industries as a task and run it hourly or every morning with the freshness filter set to the last hour or the last 24 hours, so you see new leads while quote slots are still free.

Is the data complete? It is everything the board publishes inside its rolling two-week window, for the filters you chose. It is not a historical archive, because the site does not keep one publicly. For very large pulls the job is split across markets or industries and the plan is printed before collection starts, so you can see exactly what was covered.

Why do the suppliers who already quoted show up as K*******T? Because that is exactly what the site publishes. Competitor names are masked at source. Rather than drop the row or invent a name, the mask is returned as a mask, in a field named so it cannot be mistaken for a company name, alongside the competitor facts that are real — location, business type, badges, years and timing.

How do I collect more than 5,000 leads? Choose several buyer markets, several industries or several search terms, or just raise the total and leave the automatic split on. Each combination is collected separately and the results are de-duplicated, so the totals add up instead of repeating.

Why is postedAt empty on some rows? Because the exact dates are an optional extra and were either switched off or capped by the enriched-lead ceiling. Those rows still carry the site's own age wording in postedLabel, and isDetailEnriched tells you which is which.