AliExpress Product Search Scraper

Apify Actor that scrapes public AliExpress search results for legitimate dropshipping intel, market research, and price monitoring.

Built with Crawlee + Playwright, concurrency 1, polite 2–4s delays, productId deduplication. Apify RESIDENTIAL proxy is strongly recommended — AliExpress frequently blocks datacenter IPs.

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What it does

1. Opens AliExpress wholesale/search pages for your query
2. Extracts structured fields from public result cards (embedded JSON + DOM fallback)
3. Deduplicates by productId and stops at maxItems
4. Writes a clean dataset for sourcing, comps, or competitive analysis

Output fields

Field	Description
productId	AliExpress product / item id
title	Product title
price	Numeric price when shown
currency	Currency code when detectable (USD, EUR, …)
orders	Orders / sold text when publicly visible (e.g. 1,000+ sold)
rating	Star rating when shown (0–5)
url	Canonical product URL
image	Product image URL when available
query	Search query used for the run
scrapedAt	ISO timestamp

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Input

Field	Required	Default	Description
query	✅	—	Search term, e.g. phone case
maxItems		15	Max unique products (cap 200)
maxPages		1	Max search pages (cap 10)
proxyConfiguration		RESIDENTIAL on	Use Apify Proxy + RESIDENTIAL

Example input

{
  "query": "phone case",
  "maxItems": 15,
  "maxPages": 1,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

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Example output (real cloud run)

Cloud verification (2026-07-29): query phone case, maxItems: 15, RESIDENTIAL proxy. Saved 12 unique products. Full dump: STORAGE_SAMPLES.json.

[
  {
    "productId": "1005010478618265",
    "title": "Luxury Plating Matte Hard PC Phone Case for iPhone 17 Air 16 15 14 13 ProMax Camera Lens Film Protector Frosted Shockproof Cover",
    "price": 10.71,
    "currency": "USD",
    "orders": "4,000+ sold",
    "rating": null,
    "url": "https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005010478618265.html",
    "image": "https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S949c4fe82c5e41668a450bda195e3cfaI.jpg_480x480q75.jpg_.avif",
    "query": "phone case",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-07-29T05:29:40.972Z"
  }
]

rating is included when AliExpress shows it on the search card; many cards omit stars on the listing grid.

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Suggested pricing

Plan	Price	Notes
Pay per result	$1.50–3 / 1,000 results	Occasional sourcing / market checks
Rental	$25–39 / month	Recurring dropshipping / price monitoring

Residential proxy compute is billed separately by Apify.

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Responsible use / Terms of Service

• Use only for legitimate market research, dropshipping sourcing, and price monitoring on publicly available search result data.
• Respect AliExpress Terms of Use, robots / crawling policies, and applicable local laws.
• Do not use this Actor to overwhelm AliExpress infrastructure, bypass authentication for private data, scrape personal information beyond what is publicly shown on search cards, or violate anti-bot rules at abusive scale.
• Keep concurrency low (default 1), use polite delays, and enable RESIDENTIAL proxies.
• You are responsible for compliance with AliExpress ToS and your jurisdiction’s data / fair-use rules.

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Tips for reliable runs

1. Start with maxItems ≤ 15 and maxPages = 1.
2. Always enable Apify Proxy → RESIDENTIAL for production runs.
3. Displayed currency and orders follow AliExpress localization for the request IP / locale.
4. Avoid aggressive schedules; space recurring runs by minutes, not seconds.
5. If you get 0 items, check DEBUG_HTML / DEBUG_STRUCTURE key-value store and retry with a different proxy country.

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Local development

export APIFY_TOKEN=$(grep '^APIFY_TOKEN=' ../.env | cut -d= -f2-)
npm install --registry https://registry.npmjs.org/
apify run

On Apify Cloud:

apify push -f
apify call joseolmedosotoaguirre/aliexpress-product-search --input '{...}'

Actor: https://console.apify.com/actors/Fcd5EgZmsrsPzH1KU
Username slug: joseolmedosotoaguirre/aliexpress-product-search