1688 Scraper — Wholesale Prices, MOQ & Order Quotes
Pricing
from $5.00 / 1,000 listing at full details
1688.com listings as typed records: the wholesale price ladder, the minimum order, a quote for the quantity you actually intend to buy, sales figures labelled with what they measure, and Chinese and English titles kept apart.
First build. Not published yet: the data source's field maps are written from a real response first (VALIDATION.md).
Priced to the market before publishing: full detail $0.005 (was $0.012), run start $0.005 (was $0.01), listing level unchanged at $0.002. Renamed "1688 Scraper — Wholesale Prices, MOQ & Order Quotes", the term the category is searched by.
A listing whose variants are priced apart, with no ladder, is quoted as a range — cheapest variant to dearest, on both the unit price and the subtotal. It used to be quoted as null, which on the first live run left two of three listings with no quote at all.
Off promotion, originalPrice spans the same variants as price. It was
the single listing figure, which read as one price beside a range.
1688 listings as typed records, through the OTAPI 1688 data source on RapidAPI. Input by offer id, by listing URL, or by search keyword. Taobao and Tmall are planned through a second data source; asking for them today is refused before any work is done.
Everything specific to a data source — paths, auth style, paging, id format, error reporting, where search hits live, field maps — travels with the source, and every stage reads it from there.
1688 ids are written abb-… by the data source. The prefix is added to each
request and stripped from everything returned, so records, URLs and inputs
only ever carry the platform's own offer id.
A listing is never mistaken for a platform refusal. Refusal markers used to be matched against the whole response, and 滑块 is also a large 1688 category, so linear-guide slider listings came back as refused and empty.
Typed wholesale ladders are read, including rungs that give only a starting quantity, each closed by the next rung's start. Values in name/value lists are addressed by name. Facts a typed value cannot state — a sales figure's window, whether stock is exact — come from the data source's hints.
The quote never falls back to the headline price while a ladder exists. On 1688 the headline is the cheapest rung — the price at the largest order — so quoting a 2-piece order off it understated a real listing by 30% (4.3 元 a piece quoted as 3.3). Below the first rung the first rung's price applies and the order is flagged as under the minimum; in a gap, the rung below.
Listing-level records carry the wholesale ladder, stock and a quote when the search result includes them, which on 1688 is about half the time.
A search page the data source did not fill ends the search, saving a billed call per run for an empty next page. Only applied where this Actor sets the page size itself.
A field path may name alternatives (a|b), used for a promotion price that
falls back to the regular one.
Full-detail records are read from the data source's real item responses: minimum order, ladder, promotion, the registered company as the shop, three typed seller scores, variants with their Chinese axes, and the seller's attributes with variant axes left out and repeated properties kept whole.
A promotion price is no longer mixed with the regular variant prices into a false price span.
Runs started on a free Apify plan are capped at 3 listings, or 20 listing-level records (one search call), since those runs earn nothing while their data-source calls still cost.
A run stops early when its listings mostly come back unavailable: after ten failures making up more than half of those tried, or twenty in a row.
A rejected API key (HTTP 401/403) fails the run at once with the data source's own reason. It used to be retried per listing, each listing then read as "unavailable", and the run reported success — blaming the ids for an expired key. Other client errors (a wrong path, 404) are no longer retried either; rate limits and server errors still are.
A translated title that keeps a brand in Chinese stays in titleEn; only a
mostly-Chinese title is moved to titleCn.
A search the data source fails to answer no longer crashes the run with a traceback. With nothing in hand the run fails with the data source's reason; with records already delivered, or ids given alongside the keyword, it keeps those and says in its status that the search stopped.
A zero is not a price: 1688 shows 面议 (price on request) as zero, and a zero quoted as an order cost would read as free. A zero listing price is null, a zero rung is dropped, and a zero promotion falls back to the regular price.
titleCn and titleEn are kept apart, and a title with no Chinese in it is
never put in titleCn.
sourceTextCn is filled where a value was read from listing text and null
where it arrived as a typed number, including a number that merely arrived
as a string.
Prices parsed as spans, not strings: a listing showing 128.00-298.00
returns value 128 and valueMax 298, with the original text kept.
Sales figures carry their meaning. 月销1000+ and 已售2万+ are both
"sales" on the page and are not the same measurement, so each record states
the count, whether it is a floor, the window (monthly, last 30 days,
cumulative) and what is counted (orders, buyers, items).
阶梯价 wholesale ladders as a sorted list of {minQty, maxQty, unitPrice},
with the top step left open-ended. Minimum order quantity typed separately.
A second, much cheaper detail level. detailLevel: "listing" sells the
search response itself — title, price, sales with its window and unit,
seller, image, discount — billing product-listed instead of
product-normalised. One provider call returns a whole page, where full
detail is one call per listing. Those records carry status: "listed", and
the fields a search hit cannot carry come back empty rather than null, so
absent-from-this-endpoint stays distinguishable from the-listing-was-silent.
An empty search result page is read as empty rather than as a missing field, which used to yield one garbage hit per page — and in listing mode a garbage hit looks like progress, so pagination carried on spending calls.
Optional quantity input produces a quote per listing: the unit price
resolved against the 阶梯价 ladder, the subtotal, which tier it landed on,
and whether the quantity clears the seller's minimum. A span-priced listing
is quoted as the span rather than silently at the low end.
A listing URL pasted into the ids field has its id read out of it, and an entry with no id in it is skipped with a warning. Both used to be sent to the provider verbatim, at one billed call each for a guaranteed miss.
An unsupported platform fails the run instead of being relabelled
taobao, which produced records carrying a Taobao URL for listings that
were not on Taobao.
An overlapping wholesale ladder quotes the dearest matching rung rather than the first one found, so a quote never understates what an order costs.
The listing price counts as a candidate when deriving a price span, so a listing at 9.90 with one variant at 19.90 reports the span.
A negative figure is refused rather than returned as its magnitude: -5
used to parse as 5.0, because the digit scan dropped the sign.
Listings are fetched in parallel, 5 at a time by default, which takes
throughput from about 60 a minute to about 280 against a 300 ms provider
round-trip. Request spacing is enforced across all workers rather than per
worker, so raising concurrency cannot multiply the request rate past the
provider's limit. Records are still written, and billed, in the order asked.
discountPct against the struck-through price, and skuCount recorded
before the SKU array can be dropped, so turning includeSkus off still
tells you the listing has variants.
Shipping terms distinguish 包邮 (seller pays), a stated fee, and 到付 (the courier collects, so neither applies).
The three Taobao seller scores kept apart, each with a signed peer delta: 高于同行20.15% is +20.15, 低于同行3.2% is -3.2, 持平 is 0.
SKU matrix decoded from Taobao's packed pid:vid:axis:value string into
{axis: value} per variant, with its own price and stock.
万 / 亿 / 千 converted in Decimal, not float: 2.3亿 is 230000000, not
229999999.99999997.
Fullwidth input folded through NFKC before parsing, so １２８．００,
￥, ～ and a fullwidth comma read the same as their halfwidth forms.
stock is an object, not an integer: the platform publishes a rounded
figure (the provider docs label it 库存(没有精确，是模糊值)), so the field
carries isApproximate and its source text rather than implying a count.
A price span whose sourceTextCn is null was derived from the listing's own
SKU prices rather than printed as a range by the listing.
A listing upstream refused, that does not exist, or whose payload does not
fit the configured field map is returned with a status explaining which,
and is not billed.
