China Supplier Price Comparator: Alibaba & Made-in-China

Type a product keyword and get the supplier offers for it from Alibaba.com and Made-in-China.com in one dataset with the same fields: unit price in USD, minimum order quantity, supplier, years on the platform, badges, ratings, and the landed cost per unit for your quantity, duty rate and freight. No login, no browser, no API key.

What it does

Each keyword is searched on both marketplaces. Every offer on the result pages becomes one record, whichever site it came from. A free COMPARISON record in the key-value store answers the question most runs are for: the cheapest offer, the cheapest offer your quantity can actually order, and each marketplace's median price and median minimum order.

Measured on 2026-11-14: first record in about 2 seconds, 80 offers in 3 seconds, 7,780 offers for 40 keywords in 132 seconds (about 3,500 offers per minute) with no failed or blocked request.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
queries	string[]	required	Product keywords, one per entry ("yoga mat"). Up to 50. URLs are rejected and listed in SUMMARY.invalidQueries.
marketplaces	string[]	both	made-in-china, alibaba or both.
maxItems	integer	80	Total offer records (1–20000), split evenly: every keyword gets the same share on every marketplace, from the top of the result list.
quantity	integer	100	Units you want to buy. Drives meetsMoq, orderQuantity and orderCost.
dutyRatePercent	number	0	Import duty in percent, applied to the unit price.
freightPerUnitUsd	number	0	Your freight estimate per unit in USD.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy	Datacenter proxies work for both sites.

Output

One record per offer:

{
  "kind": "offer",
  "id": "alibaba:1600845559950",
  "marketplace": "alibaba",
  "url": "https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Water-Dispenser-Cooler-Wall-Mounted-Bottle_1600845559950.html",
  "title": "Wall Mounted Outdoor Stainless Steel Water Dispenser Cooler Electric Powered Bottle Filling Station Fountain",
  "price": 380,
  "priceMax": 500,
  "currency": "USD",
  "originalPrice": 380,
  "originalPriceMax": 500,
  "originalCurrency": "USD",
  "moq": 10,
  "moqUnit": "units",
  "seller": "Suzhou Puretal Electric Co., Ltd.",
  "sellerUrl": "https://puretal.en.alibaba.com/company_profile.html",
  "sellerType": null,
  "sellerYears": 10,
  "sellerBadges": [
    "Gold Supplier"
  ],
  "sellerRating": 5,
  "productRating": 5,
  "soldText": "177 sold",
  "location": "China",
  "images": [
    "https://s.alicdn.com/@sc04/kf/Hb144ec8caf104d5ebec2e1724a97ea8aF.png"
  ],
  "sponsored": false,
  "rank": 2,
  "titleMatch": 1,
  "meetsMoq": true,
  "landedCost": 408.8,
  "landedCostMax": 537.8,
  "orderQuantity": 500,
  "orderCost": 204400,
  "query": "stainless steel water bottle",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-11-14T20:48:43.858Z"
}

How the computed fields work:

• price / priceMax are the two ends of the price range the supplier shows, in USD. Suppliers quote the low end for large orders. The listing does not say at which quantity each end applies, so both are kept.
• landedCost = price × (1 + dutyRatePercent / 100) + freightPerUnitUsd, and landedCostMax is the same on priceMax.
• meetsMoq says whether your quantity reaches the minimum order. orderQuantity is the larger of the two and orderCost = landedCost × orderQuantity, the cheapest order you could place with that supplier.
• titleMatch is the share of your keyword's words found in the title. Offers that share no word with the keyword are dropped and never charged (SUMMARY.irrelevantSkipped). The comparison only uses offers at 1.
• sponsored marks paid placements. rank is the position on the marketplace's own result list, ads included.
• Alibaba.com records carry sellerYears, sellerRating, productRating, soldText and the Gold Supplier badge. Made-in-China.com records carry sellerType (Manufacturer/Factory, Trading Company) where shown, the province in location, and badges such as Diamond Member and Audited Supplier.

The key-value store holds two free records. COMPARISON has one block per keyword: cheapest, cheapestMeetingMoq, lowestOrderCost, cheaperMarketplaceByMedian, and per marketplace the offer count, minPrice, medianPrice and medianMoq. SUMMARY has the counts per search, keywords that returned nothing, any marketplace stopped by a challenge page, latency and compute time.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.005 per run plus $0.0015 per offer record (Store discount tiers lower both by 10 to 30 % on paid Apify plans). COMPARISON and SUMMARY are free.

Run	Cost
1 keyword, top 5 offers per marketplace (10 records)	$0.005 + 10 × $0.0015 = $0.02
1 keyword, both marketplaces, 80 offers	$0.005 + 80 × $0.0015 = $0.125
40 keywords, 8,000 offers	$0.005 + 8,000 × $0.0015 = $12.005

Alibaba scrapers on the Store have a median price of $0.003 per result. This Actor charges half of that and returns two marketplaces already normalised and costed.

For AI agents

Pass queries (one or more plain product keywords) and a small maxItems. Read the COMPARISON record first: it holds the cheapest offer and the median USD price per marketplace for each keyword, so you rarely need to rank the offer records yourself. A lookup of two keywords with 20 offers returns in about 5 seconds and costs $0.005 + 20 × $0.0015 = $0.035. Prices are supplier list prices before negotiation. landedCost only includes the duty and freight you passed in.

Monitoring prices

Schedule the Actor with the same keywords and compare runs with mdcurt/dataset-diff-monitor keyed on id: it reports offers that appeared, disappeared, or changed price or moq.

Tutorials

• Minimum orders on Alibaba.com and Made-in-China.com, 40 products in examples/minimum-order-comparison/ of the Actor source: a real 7,900-offer sample (2026-11-14, 280 requests, 0 failed), the per-keyword table, the 89 cases where the same supplier lists the same keyword on both sites, and the script that rebuilds every number. Finding: the median minimum order is 10 units on Alibaba.com and 100 on Made-in-China.com.

Speed

From the live tests on 2026-11-14: first record after 1.5–2.5 s. 80 offers in 2.7 s, 540 offers in 17.5 s, 7,780 offers (40 keywords × 2 marketplaces, 278 requests) in 132 s. One request returns 30 offers on Made-in-China.com and 40 on Alibaba.com.

Limitations

• Listing pages only. Quantity price breaks, lead times and certificates are on the product pages, which this Actor does not open.
• Alibaba.com is read through its China catalogue pages, so its offers are from suppliers in China. A keyword Alibaba has no catalogue page for is tried once more in its other number ("phone case" → "phone cases"). If that fails too, the keyword is listed in SUMMARY.emptySearches for Alibaba (1 of 40 test keywords).
• 1688, AliExpress and Yiwugo are not included. In testing each answered automated requests with a login wall or a bot challenge, and this Actor does not log in or work around challenges. If a marketplace serves a challenge page during a run, its remaining searches are skipped, nothing is retried, and SUMMARY.marketplacesStopped says so.
• A keyword search returns similar products, not one identical item. The cheapest offer is the cheapest offer matching your words. Narrow the keyword ("tpe yoga mat 6mm") to compare like with like.
• About 1 % of Made-in-China.com offers show no price. They are returned with price: null and left out of the comparison.
• Minimum-order units are kept as the supplier writes them (Pieces, pieces, Sets, Meters). The Actor does not convert between units.
• Up to 20 result pages per keyword on Made-in-China.com (600 offers) and 15 on Alibaba.com (600 offers).
• Duty and freight are your inputs. This is an estimate for comparing offers, not a customs calculation.
• Only what the marketplaces show publicly is returned: product, price, company name and badges. Images are links.

Changelog

• 1.0.0 (2026-11-14): first release.