Wholesale Central Supplier Directory Scraper

Scrape wholesale supplier and dropshipper listings from WholesaleCentral.com — one of the largest B2B wholesale directories in the US, connecting retailers with wholesalers, importers, manufacturers, dropshippers, and liquidators since 1997. Browse by product category or run a keyword search across the whole catalog. Get company name, category, location, minimum order, and contact info (phone, address, website, social media) — no registration, no login required.

What this actor does

• Browse by category — 54+ curated top-level departments (Apparel, Electronics, Health & Beauty, Toys & Games, Jewelry, and more), plus an advanced free-text override for any of WholesaleCentral's 290+ sub-categories
• Keyword search — search the full catalog by product or company keyword
• Full pagination — automatically walks every result page of a category or search (not just the first) until maxItems is reached or the source is exhausted
• Supplier type — narrow to WholesaleCentral's own Dropshippers or Closeout/Liquidator departments
• Filters — location (state/region text match), maximum minimum-order amount, keyword, featured listings only
• Rich per-supplier data — optionally enriches every result with phone number, full mailing address, website URL, company description, and social media links from the supplier's detail page
• Empty fields are omitted — no null/blank noise in the output

Output per supplier

• name, slug
• category, supplierType
• location, city, state
• memberSince, minimumOrderUSD
• isFeaturedListing
• phone, websiteUrl, address
• companyDescription, socialMediaLinks[]
• detailUrl, sourceUrl
• recordType: "supplier", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	byCategory	byCategory (browse) or search (keyword)
category	string	Apparel	Category to browse (mode=byCategory)
customCategorySlug	string	–	Advanced: override with any wholesalecentral.com category slug
searchQuery	string	bluetooth speakers	Keyword search (mode=search)
supplierType	string	all	all / wholesaler / manufacturer / importer / dropshipper / liquidator
state	string	–	Only suppliers whose location contains this text
maxMinimumOrderUSD	int	–	Only suppliers with minimum order ≤ this amount
keyword	string	–	Only suppliers whose name/description contains this text
featuredOnly	bool	false	Only suppliers WholesaleCentral.com badges as a "Featured" (premium/paid) listing
fetchSupplierDetails	bool	true	Visit each supplier's detail page for phone/address/website
proxyConfiguration	object	AUTO	Apify proxy (optional, helps against IP-based rate limiting)
maxItems	int	20	Hard cap on emitted records (1–500)

Example: apparel wholesalers in California

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "category": "Apparel",
  "state": "California",
  "maxItems": 30
}

Example: dropshippers for pet supplies

{
  "mode": "byCategory",
  "category": "Pet-Supplies",
  "supplierType": "dropshipper",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: keyword search

{
  "mode": "search",
  "searchQuery": "bluetooth speakers",
  "maxMinimumOrderUSD": 200,
  "maxItems": 25
}

Use cases

• Retail/e-commerce sourcing — find wholesale suppliers for a specific product category
• Dropshipping — build a shortlist of dropshipping-ready suppliers by niche
• Liquidation buying — find closeout/liquidation suppliers for discount resale
• Market research — analyze supplier density, minimum order thresholds, and geographic distribution by category
• Lead generation — build a contact list of wholesale suppliers for B2B outreach

FAQ

What's WholesaleCentral.com? A B2B directory (part of Sumner Communications, which also runs IndustryNet and Closeout Central) connecting retail buyers directly with wholesale suppliers, importers, manufacturers, and dropshippers across hundreds of product categories.

Does WholesaleCentral separately label suppliers as "wholesaler", "manufacturer", or "importer"? No — the site doesn't expose that distinction as a filter. Only "Dropshippers" and "Closeout Suppliers" are structurally separate departments on the site, so those two supplierType values narrow results to a genuinely different listing set; wholesaler/manufacturer/importer browse the selected category unrestricted.

Why do some suppliers have no phone or websiteUrl? Not every supplier discloses a phone number or website publicly, and some detail pages only show a website link (no phone) or vice versa. The field is simply omitted rather than shown as empty.

Why is minimumOrderUSD sometimes 0? 0 means the supplier explicitly advertises "No minimum order" — a real, meaningful value, not a placeholder. If minimum order isn't disclosed at all, the field is omitted instead.

Does this need a login or proxy? No login. WholesaleCentral.com is B2B/public browsing (no account required to view listings). It runs behind a bot-detection challenge that a real headless browser passes automatically on a direct connection — no paid/residential proxy is required, and Apify's own free shared AUTO proxy group is actually slower and less reliable against this particular site's WAF than a direct connection, so proxyConfiguration defaults to off. Only enable it if you're running very high volumes and want to spread requests across IPs.

What if a category has very few suppliers? Some niche categories or geography combinations genuinely have few listings on WholesaleCentral. The actor returns everything it finds; an empty result means the source itself has no matching suppliers.

Why does a run occasionally return suppliers without phone/address/companyDescription/socialMediaLinks even with fetchSupplierDetails on? WholesaleCentral.com's ad stack occasionally fires a same-tab redirect attempt while loading a supplier's "About supplier" contact panel. The actor blocks the redirect and retries automatically, but if this happens on several suppliers in a row during a run (an ad-serving condition on the source's side, outside the actor's control), it automatically stops attempting further detail-page enrichment for the rest of that run so your requested maxItems records are still delivered promptly with their listing-level fields (name, category, location, minimum order). Re-running later, when the source's ad-serving condition has cleared, typically restores full enrichment.