AliExpress → 1688 Sourcing Bridge

Turn AliExpress product URLs into a 1688 supplier shortlist — one row per supplier, with wholesale and consign prices in CNY, MOQ, factory signals, and an estimated per-unit margin.

Most AliExpress scrapers sell raw listings. Most 1688 image-search Actors accept a photo. This Actor joins the two: it reads an AliExpress product, takes its main image, runs a reverse image search on 1688.com, and returns sourcing rows you can act on.

What you get

Three flat row types in one dataset (type tells them apart):

type	Meaning
source	One AliExpress product lookup: title, main image, USD price, sold text, rating, fetch status
match	One 1688 supplier offer: wholesale/consign price (CNY), MOQ, booked count, supplier city/province, years on 1688, factory flags, offer URL, estimated unit margin
summary	Per-item rollup: match count, best margin, best supplier, factory count, top 3 margins

The run report is stored as RUN_SUMMARY in the key-value store: requested/delivered counts, skipped items by reason, coverage metrics, request usage, FX rate and charged amount. The completeness identity delivered.summaries + sum(skippedBy) = requested.dedupedItems is verified before exit, so items are never silently dropped.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
aliexpressUrls	string[]	—	Up to 100 product URLs (aliexpress.com/item/<id>.html, aliexpress.us/item/<id>.html; query strings are fine)
imageUrls	string[]	—	Up to 100 direct product image URLs. Skips AliExpress lookup; no lookup fee, no AE price, so margin is null
maxSuppliersPerItem	int	10	1–20, in similarity order
shipTo	string	US	Two-letter destination used for the AliExpress session (prices vary by country)
marginCurrency	enum	USD	USD or CNY
maxTotalChargeUsd	number	2	Hard per-run charge cap, minimum 0.04
maxRequestsPerRun	int	1200	Request quota guard, 50–2000

You can mix URL and image inputs in one run. Duplicates are removed by AliExpress item id (URLs) or by exact image URL.

Output example

{
  "type": "match",
  "itemKey": "ae:1005012030698792",
  "aeItemId": "1005012030698792",
  "offerId": "692120494348",
  "similarityRank": 1,
  "title1688": "源头工厂不入耳无线蓝牙耳机X15电竞游戏双模式无延迟tws蓝牙耳机",
  "priceYuan": 8.2,
  "consignPriceYuan": 7.5,
  "moq": 5,
  "bookedCount": 1200,
  "supplierName": "深圳某某科技有限公司",
  "supplierCity": "深圳",
  "supplierProvince": "广东",
  "yearsOnPlatform": 4,
  "compositeScore": 3.1,
  "isFactory": true,
  "isSuperFactory": false,
  "offerUrl": "https://detail.1688.com/offer/692120494348.html",
  "estMarginPerUnit": 2.15,
  "estMarginPct": 53.8,
  "marginBasis": "consign",
  "matchedBy": "image"
}

estMarginPerUnit is negative when the 1688 cost exceeds the AliExpress price. Negative margins are reported as-is: a product to avoid is also an answer.

Pricing (pay-per-event)

All prices are FREE-tier list prices. Subscription tiers receive the discounts below.

Event	FREE	BRONZE (−10%)	SILVER (−20%)	GOLD (−30%)	PLATINUM (−30%)	DIAMOND (−30%)	Charged when
run-base-fee	$0.00005	$0.00005	$0.00005	$0.00005	$0.00005	$0.00005	Once per run, only if at least one billable row is delivered
ae-item-lookup	$0.005	$0.0045	$0.004	$0.0035	$0.0035	$0.0035	Per AliExpress item with fetchStatus: "ok"
supplier-match	$0.008	$0.0072	$0.0064	$0.0056	$0.0056	$0.0056	Per match row actually written to the dataset

Discounts are applied by Apify according to the subscriber's plan. There is no platform start fee.

Free: blocked or region-unavailable AliExpress lookups, items stopped by budget/quota/deadline, image-conversion failures, zero-match image searches, and matches cut by your budget. You pay only for rows actually delivered.

Worked examples (FREE tier):

Order	Calculation	Total
1 AE product, 10 matches	$0.00005 + $0.005 + 10 × $0.008	$0.08505
10 AE products, 10 matches each	$0.00005 + 10 × $0.005 + 100 × $0.008	$0.85005
10 image URLs, 10 matches each	$0.00005 + 100 × $0.008	$0.80005
1 AE product, no 1688 match	$0.00005 + $0.005	$0.00505

The default maxTotalChargeUsd is $2, which covers roughly 23 fully matched AE products at 10 suppliers each. Raise it for larger batches; when the cap is reached the run stops gracefully and reports trigger: "budget" plus skippedBy.budget.

Margin math

One USD/CNY rate is captured at the start of the run and reported in RUN_SUMMARY.fx (rate, source, timestamp). No multi-currency matrix is maintained.

• Cost basis: consignPriceYuan when the 1688 offer exposes a dropship/consign price, otherwise priceYuan (marginBasis records which).
• AE unit revenue uses the regular listing price for the selected variant. New-shopper prices, coupon codes and "save $X" banners are deliberately excluded, so margins are not inflated by one-off discounts.
• USD: estMarginPerUnit = aePriceUsd − costCNY ÷ fx
• CNY: estMarginPerUnit = aePriceUsd × fx − costCNY
• estMarginPct = estMarginPerUnit ÷ AE unit revenue × 100

Margin estimates are indicative, not guaranteed. They exclude shipping, duties, payment fees, returns and platform commissions. Always verify with a sample order.

How it works

1. AliExpress leg — a real browser with a fresh sticky residential session per item (country = shipTo) opens the product page and reads publicly visible data. If the page is anti-bot challenged, the session is rotated up to two times. No challenge is ever solved, no login is used.
2. Image conversion — the main image is downloaded and inspected by magic bytes, not by file extension. AliExpress CDN often serves WebP bytes from .jpg URLs. WebP/AVIF images are converted to real JPEG (max 800×800, quality 85) before upload.
3. 1688 leg — the converted JPEG is uploaded to 1688's image service and searched with the existing production image-search engine: per-identity quotas, residential China sessions, token cache, risk-control rotation. Card fields come straight from the search response (no extra 1688 detail calls).

Limits and honest caveats

• Visual similarity ≠ same product or same factory. Match rows are ordered by the platform's similarity rank. Marketing photos and lifestyle shots recall worse than clean product shots. Verify before ordering.
• AliExpress anti-bot is real. Detail pages are protected. A blocked item is returned as a source row with fetchStatus: "blocked" and is not billed. The run report counts it under skippedBy.blocked.
• imageUrls input has no AliExpress price, so margin fields are null. Match rows are still full price; the 1688 supplier data is the deliverable.
• Prices vary by destination. shipTo changes the AliExpress price. The Actor forces a USD display where the site allows it; if only a non-USD price is available, the item is marked unavailable_in_region and not billed.
• AliExpress sold/rating fields are platform-displayed values, not independently verified.
• Supplier names stay in Chinese as registered on 1688. compositeScore and isFactory are raw platform signals. This Actor does not claim a supplier is "verified"; the judgment is yours.
• Run window. Default timeout is 1,200 seconds. Large batches can hit the deadline or budget; the run stops gracefully and reports partial: true with the exact reason.
• Public data only. No login, no cookies from you, no personal data, no buyer review text.

Disclosure

Finds wholesale suppliers on 1688.com for AliExpress products using image search. Scrapes publicly available data without login. Users are responsible for complying with AliExpress's and 1688's terms of service.

You are billed only for rows actually delivered. Failed, blocked and empty lookups are never billed.

Margin estimates use a single exchange rate captured at run time (disclosed in run summary). They are indicative, not guaranteed.

Files

• src/main.js — orchestration, gates, billing, completeness
• src/ae-client.js — AliExpress browser layer (detail + search fallback)
• src/ae-parse.js — pure parsers for AliExpress HTML/JSON
• src/image-convert.js — magic-byte detection and JPEG normalization
• src/margin.js, src/fx.js — unit economics
• src/image-search.js, src/image-search-probe.js — 1688 reverse image search engine
• src/token-cache.js — cross-run mtop token cache
• src/billing.js — pay-per-event ledger