AliExpress Landed Cost: Real Price + Real Freight

Find out what an AliExpress product will really cost you, delivered to your country: the real variant prices plus the actual shipping quote, in one number.

Most AliExpress tools give you a price. For sourcing decisions, that price is usually wrong in two ways at once, and both of them make the product look cheaper than it is.

1. The price shown is often a welcome-deal price. The cheapest figure on a listing is frequently a new-buyer or first-order price that nobody restocking will ever pay. In September 2026 a popular AliExpress scraper returned roughly £0.85 on nearly every listing, whatever the product. A business plan costed from that number is fiction.

2. Shipping is usually ignored, and you can't predict it from size. Across 63 real products quoted to the UK, shipping was a flat £1.99 on 51 of them. A 49×27×20cm, 2.8kg box shipped for the same £1.99 as a keyring. But the expensive exceptions are where the money goes:

Product	Item price	Shipping	Landed
Vacuum bags, no pump	£1.99	£1.99	£3.98
Vacuum bags + electric pump	£7.79	£1.99	£9.78
Vacuum bag packaging	£10.09	£72.41 (DHL)	£82.50

That third row is a real result from this Actor. A tool that ignores shipping calls it a £10 product. It is an £82.50 product.

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Who it is for

• Dropshippers pricing listings on eBay, Amazon, Shopify, Etsy or TikTok Shop
• Product researchers comparing which products still make money once shipped
• Resellers and small shops checking a supplier before ordering stock
• Anyone building a margin calculator who needs real cost data through an API

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What you get for each product

Field	What it means
title, url, product_id	The product and its page
price_min, price_median, price_max	Real prices across every variant (size, colour...), not a "from" price
price_spread_x	Most expensive variant divided by the cheapest. Above about 2 means the cheapest price isn't a fair price for the product. One product in testing spanned 8.91× across 32 variants.
freight_cost	The cheapest tracked delivery option to your country
freight_service, freight_days, freight_tracked	The carrier, the delivery estimate in days and whether it's tracked
freight_options_count	How many delivery options AliExpress offered
ships_to_country	Whether the product can be sent to your country at all
landed_cost	Cheapest variant + shipping. The number to put your margin on.
landed_cost_median_sku	Median variant + shipping, for a more typical cost
images	Up to 12 real product image URLs (optional)
skus	Every variant with its price and stock (optional)
error, freight_error	Why a product couldn't be costed. These rows are free.

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How to use it (step by step)

1. Get your AliExpress API credentials (one time)

This Actor uses your own AliExpress API access, and that's deliberate. AliExpress's API agreement says an activated Open Platform account "can only be used by the relevant Developer", so nobody can legitimately sell you access to their own key. What you pay for here is the integration and the costing logic. AliExpress doesn't charge for the API calls.

1. Register as a developer at the AliExpress Open Platform (openservice.aliexpress.com).
2. Create an app with access to the Dropshipping APIs and wait for approval.
3. In the App Console, copy your App Key and App Secret.
4. Authorise the app with your AliExpress account (the OAuth step) to get an Access Token. It lasts about 30 days, and your refresh token renews it.
5. Turn off the app's IP whitelist. In the App Console, click Manage on your app, then App Management → IP Whitelist. Clear the box and click Submit (an empty box switches the whitelist off). If it's on, AliExpress only accepts requests from the addresses listed, and Apify's servers aren't among them, so every run is blocked. The Actor tells you plainly if this happens, and you aren't charged.

2. Fill in the form

• Search keyword: e.g. vacuum storage bags. The Actor finds products and costs them.
• Product IDs or links: paste full product links or just the IDs. You can use these, a keyword, or both.
• Ship to country: a two-letter code such as GB, US, DE, FR or AU. Shipping is quoted for this destination, so it changes the answer.
• Currency: e.g. GBP, USD, EUR.
• Max products: the run stops after this many.
• Your three credentials: paste them into the encrypted fields. They're never shown in logs.

3. Click Start

Results appear in the Output tab as each product is costed. Ten products usually take under 20 seconds.

4. Use the results

Sort by landed_cost, filter out ships_to_country: false, and check price_spread_x before trusting the cheapest price. Export as Excel, CSV or JSON, or send straight to Google Sheets, Zapier, Make or your own app through the Apify API.

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Ready-made examples

Cost a search, delivered to the UK

{
  "searchKeyword": "magnetic phone holder",
  "shipToCountry": "GB",
  "currency": "GBP",
  "maxProducts": 20
}

Check specific products you're about to list, delivered to the US, with every variant

{
  "productIds": [
    "https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006232978114.html",
    "1005010601776150"
  ],
  "shipToCountry": "US",
  "currency": "USD",
  "includeSkus": true
}

Compare the same products across countries: run the same input twice with shipToCountry set to GB and then DE. Shipping often differs a lot.

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Pricing

You pay one product-costed event per product that comes back with a full landed cost (price and shipping). You are never charged for:

• a product that can't be sent to your country
• a product with no shipping quote
• a product AliExpress returns an error for
• an empty search
• a run with wrong or expired credentials, or blocked by your app's IP whitelist (it stops straight away and tells you why)

Those products still appear in your results with the reason, so you can see what happened. Set a maximum cost per run and the Actor stops cleanly when it's reached.

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Built from real mistakes

Two AliExpress API quirks quietly make every product look free to ship. This Actor handles both:

• The shipping quote comes back under delivery_option_d_t_o, not the documented delivery_option_dto. Read the documented name and you get zero options, so every product looks shipping-free.
• shipping_fee_cent is in whole pounds or dollars, not cents. Divide it by 100 as the name suggests and £1.99 of shipping becomes 2p.

It also retries: AliExpress's shipping service sometimes errors on one variant and quotes the next one fine, so the Actor tries up to three before giving up.

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Honest limits

• Shipping is quoted for one variant. Weight can differ slightly between sizes and colours, so treat it as accurate for pricing a listing, not exact per variant.
• Wide price spreads can't be summed up in one number. That's what price_spread_x is for: spot them and pick a variant deliberately.
• Your access token expires about monthly. Refresh it and update the input.
• AliExpress rate limits apply to your own app, not to this Actor.
• Prices are what the API returns for your account and country. Shop discounts and coupons at checkout aren't included.

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FAQ

Why do I need my own credentials? AliExpress's API agreement doesn't allow one developer's access to be used by other people. Any tool offering AliExpress API data without your own keys is either scraping the website or breaking those terms.

Can I use it for countries other than the UK? Yes. Any country AliExpress delivers to. Set shipToCountry and currency.

Why was a product not charged? Look at its error or freight_error field. If there's no landed cost, there's no charge.

My run failed with a message about an IP whitelist. Your AliExpress app only accepts requests from approved addresses. Clear it under App Management → IP Whitelist (step 5 above) and run again.

My run failed straight away with a credentials message. Your access token has probably expired. Refresh it with your refresh token (or re-authorise the app) and paste the new one in.