AliExpress Image Search Scraper | Find Products by Photo

🚀 AliExpress Image Search Scraper | Find Products by Photo

Find products by photo on AliExpress. The AliExpress Image Search Scraper takes photo URLs and returns the visually matching AliExpress listings, the same "search by image" AliExpress runs on its own site, with sale and original price, discount, unit price, star rating, units sold and a best match flag. Built for dropshipping product research, supplier sourcing, competitor price checks and matching your catalogue to AliExpress, without an AliExpress API key.

🎯 Use Cases

• Find a product by image: paste a photo from Instagram, TikTok, a competitor's store or a customer message and get the AliExpress listings that sell it.
• Find the cheapest seller by photo: sort AliExpress image search results by price and see who sells the same item for less, in the buyer's country and currency.
• Research AliExpress dropshipping products: sort matches by most orders to see which listing of a viral product already sells, and how many sellers compete for it.
• Catalogue matching: map your SKUs to AliExpress equivalents by image instead of by title, for sourcing or price benchmarking.
• Reverse image search products at scale: hundreds of images per run, one row per match, ready for a spreadsheet or your own pipeline.

✨ Features

• Photo in, products out: any direct image URL (JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF or AVIF, up to 20 MB; big phone photos are scaled down and sideways ones turned upright before the search) or a data: URL / base64 string. One search per image: 60 matches on the first page; each further page adds the matches not seen yet (often 30 to 50 on the second page, few after that). AliExpress usually holds about 100 to 170 distinct matches per photo (its later pages repeat earlier ones), so a deep search ends there, and the run status tells you when an image ran out before your limit.
• Real prices for your market: choose the ship-to country and currency; prices, discounts and availability follow it (e.g. GB in GBP, DE in EUR).
• Ranked and flagged: matches come in AliExpress's own order with the best similar item marked, plus most-orders and price sorts. AliExpress sorts a set of 60 matches, not everything it holds for the photo: for the cheapest or best-selling match overall, raise maxResultsPerImage to 300 so the Actor merges every page and sorts the whole list.
• Sourcing signals: sale vs. original price, discount percentage, a flag for new-shopper (Welcome Deal) prices, per-piece price, rating, exact sold count, launch date, Choice tag and the selling-point tags shown on the card (bulk prices, delivery, coupons).
• Fast: a few seconds per image; hundreds of images per run.
• Fair billing: one price per image searched and a small price per extra page. Images that fail to load or return no matches are free, and the run stops cleanly at your maximum charge per run.

🛠️ How AliExpress Search by Image Works

1. Paste image URLs: product photos from your catalogue, a competitor's store, or any page.
2. Pick market and depth: ship-to country, currency, sort order and how many matches per image.
3. Run the scraper: get one row per matching product, grouped by the image that found it. Download JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull it through the API.

Ready-made tasks on the Examples tab cover the common jobs: find a product by image, the cheapest seller by photo, best-selling matches for dropshipping, and UK or Germany prices.

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Description
imageUrls	array	Photos to search with: direct image URLs, data: URLs or base64. Empty = the example photo. Also read from imageUrl, images, url, urls, startUrls, imagesBase64.
shipTo	string	Two-letter ship-to country, e.g. US, GB (or UK), DE, BR. Default US. Russia is not available (AliExpress serves it from a separate site).
currency	string	Three-letter currency, e.g. USD, EUR, GBP. Default USD.
sort	string	best_match (default), orders, price_asc, price_desc.
maxResultsPerImage	integer	Matches per image, 1 to 1,000. Default 60 (one page).

{
    "imageUrls": [
        "https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/Sbf5a5b9337a442c99336f7e29821977fx.jpg",
        "https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S855220c50df546d5bab115643d3982d6R.jpg"
    ],
    "shipTo": "GB",
    "currency": "GBP",
    "sort": "orders",
    "maxResultsPerImage": 60
}

💰 Pricing

Pay per image searched. No monthly rental.

Event	Price	What you get
Image search	$0.02	One image searched, up to 60 matches
Results page	$0.01	Each additional page that brings new matches for the same image (about 45 new on the second page, fewer after)

Examples:

• 100 images at the default 60 matches = 100 × $0.02 = $2.00.
• 1 image with maxResultsPerImage 100 (60 + about 45 new on the second page) = $0.02 + $0.01 = $0.03. Everything AliExpress holds for a photo (maxResultsPerImage 300) usually takes 2 to 7 extra pages: $0.04 to $0.09.
• 500 images at 60 matches = $10.00.

Images that cannot be loaded or return no matches are not charged. An image is reported as having no matches only after it was uploaded three times and AliExpress returned nothing each time.

📊 Sample Output Data

One row per match. Example from a real run (US, USD):

{
    "queryImage": "https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/Sbf5a5b9337a442c99336f7e29821977fx.jpg",
    "rank": 1,
    "isBestMatch": false,
    "productId": "1005012800262062",
    "url": "https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005012800262062.html",
    "title": "10-100Pcs Artificial Strawberries Fake Plastic Fruit for Home Kitchen Garden Decoration Photo Props Christmas Party DIY Decor",
    "image": "https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/Sbf5a5b9337a442c99336f7e29821977fx.jpg",
    "price": 1.09,
    "originalPrice": 5.14,
    "discountPercent": 78,
    "unitPrice": 0.11,
    "unitLabel": "pc",
    "currency": "USD",
    "isNewShopperPrice": true,
    "rating": 5,
    "sold": 78,
    "soldText": "78 sold",
    "launchedAt": "2026-07-23",
    "sellingPoints": ["$1.04 each, ≥ 2 pieces", "New shoppers save $4.05"],
    "isChoice": true,
    "shipTo": "US",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-10-20T06:02:28.652Z"
}

rank is the position across all pages for that image. isBestMatch is true on the item AliExpress labels "best similar", when it shows one. unitPrice and unitLabel give the per-piece price of multi-piece listings, sold is the exact number of units sold (soldText is the card's text), isNewShopperPrice is true when the price is AliExpress's Welcome Deal for a shopper's first order (every logged-out visitor sees it; a returning buyer pays more, so compare suppliers on rows where it is false or treat those prices as a floor), and launchedAt is the date the listing went live.

Images that fail come back as { "queryImage": "...", "status": "image_error" | "no_matches" | "failed", "error": "..." } rows and are not charged. image_error means the image itself could not be used (dead link, a web page instead of a photo, plain words or a file name instead of a URL, an unreadable or HEIC file, an image under 16 px); the run still succeeds. AliExpress answers any readable picture, even a face, a landscape or a blank image, with its nearest-looking products, so a photo that shows no product still returns (unrelated) matches and is charged.

🔁 Schedule and Integrate

To watch prices and new sellers for the products you source, run the same images daily or weekly: every run is a dated snapshot of who sells the item and at what price. Set it up in Apify Schedules. Send the results to Google Sheets, Zapier, Make, n8n or a webhook with Apify integrations, so new matches land where your team already works.

🤖 Use with AI Agents (MCP)

This Actor works as a tool in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients through the Apify MCP server (https://mcp.apify.com), so an agent can find a product by image mid-conversation. An agent can call it with:

{ "imageUrls": ["https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S855220c50df546d5bab115643d3982d6R.jpg"], "maxResultsPerImage": 20 }

❓ FAQ

Does AliExpress have an official API? AliExpress runs an affiliate and open platform program whose API requires registering an app, getting an app key and approval, and it does not offer search by image to the public. This Actor needs no key, account or approval and returns what a shopper sees in AliExpress image search: prices for your country, discounts, ratings and units sold.

How do I find a product by image on AliExpress? Paste the photo's URL into imageUrls and run. You get every visually matching listing with its link and price; sort by price_asc for the cheapest seller or orders for the best seller.

Can I use it to find AliExpress dropshipping products? Yes. Run a reverse image search on products you see in ads or competitor stores, sort by orders, and use sold, rating and price to pick the listing to source from.

Do I need an AliExpress account? No.

Why is a field empty? originalPrice is null when the listing shows no strike-through price (EU storefronts often show a 30-day lowest price in sellingPoints instead), unitPrice only exists for multi-piece listings, new listings may have no rating or sold, and isBestMatch is false on every row when AliExpress doesn't label a best similar item.

Why does the same photo return different matches on two runs? AliExpress draws each results page from a pool of about 100 to 250 matches per photo, so two searches of one photo share most, not all, of their 60 matches, and the order shifts. For a stable list, collect the whole pool (maxResultsPerImage 300) and compare by productId.

What are the limits? Images up to 20 MB (anything over ~600 KB is scaled to 800 px before the search; iPhone HEIC files need converting to JPEG first) and up to 1,000 matches per image asked for, though AliExpress itself usually has 100 to 170 distinct matches per photo, and any ship-to country AliExpress delivers to. If your maximum charge per run is reached, the run stops and the remaining images are left unsearched and unbilled.

🔗 Related Scrapers

• AliExpress Product Details Scraper: feed in the matched product URLs to get every variant, stock, shipping and seller rating.
• AliExpress Listings Scraper: the same listing data from a keyword search instead of a photo.
• 1688 Image Search Scraper: find the factory price of the same product on China's domestic 1688 wholesale market by photo.
• Alibaba Image Search Scraper: search Alibaba.com suppliers by photo for bulk orders.
• Amazon Image Search Scraper: find Amazon products that look like your photo, to compare retail prices with AliExpress.