# Changelog of Alibaba Scraper API — Products, Suppliers, Prices & Reviews (`pro100chok/alibaba-scraper`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/pro100chok/alibaba-scraper/changelog.md
- **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/pro100chok/alibaba-scraper.md

## Changelog

### 1.4 (2026-08-28)

- Supplier profiles are complete again. Alibaba rebuilt the company profile page in August and the
  trading figures, export markets and certificates moved out of the page data the scraper read into
  a new set of page modules - profiles were still coming back, but with the identity and address
  filled in and every performance figure empty. All of it is read again.
- Suppliers now come back richer than before the change: certificates carry their certificate
  number, validity period and the products they cover; each export market carries its share of
  revenue; and the profile adds years exporting, annual export revenue, nearest port, the main
  product lines, the audited capability cards (production, R\&D, quality control, services), the
  company logo, the review count and the Gold Supplier flag.
- Alibaba no longer publishes a six-month order count, so `performance.ordersLast6Months` is
  replaced by `performance.orders12Months`, the twelve-month figure it publishes instead. The same
  count on a product's inline `supplier` block is renamed with it, so both sources agree.
- `capabilities.qualityAssurance` is now a list of `{label, value}` rows (QA/QC inspectors, test
  equipment, ...) instead of plain labels, and `capabilities.qualityProcess` is gone - Alibaba
  stopped publishing that gallery.

### 1.3 (2026-08-09)

- Supplier profiles work again. Alibaba started serving its anti-bot interstitial for every
  request to a storefront's `/company_profile.html`, regardless of exit IP, country or browser
  fingerprint, which made supplier lookups fail outright. The scraper now reads the profile from
  the storefront's own sub-pages, which still return the full company payload - and in fact a
  richer one than before.
- If a storefront withholds its profile entirely, the company is now built from its homepage or
  catalog instead of being dropped: identity, location, staff, ratings and factory ranking are
  returned, with the performance metrics left empty rather than the whole record missing.
- Pages where Alibaba answers 404/503 by redirecting to an error page are recognised as failures
  instead of being parsed as if they were real.

### 1.2 (2026-08-04)

- Pay-per-event billing: search results, full product details, supplier profiles and reviews are
  charged separately, and only when the data is actually delivered. Work shared between products
  (a supplier's profile and its reviews) is charged once, not once per product.
- Each proxy session now gets its own exit IP. Previously every concurrent worker shared one
  address, which is what supplier storefronts penalise - failed supplier lookups dropped by
  roughly two thirds.
- Supplier storefronts are entered on a fresh IP, and the homepage warm-up is now only used after
  a block instead of on every session, cutting traffic per result by about 40%.

### 1.1 (2026-08-04)

- Supplier profiles and reviews are now fetched **once per supplier** and shared across all of
  that supplier's products. Previously two products of the same supplier could trigger two
  simultaneous fetches of the same page, and a supplier's reviews were re-downloaded for every
  one of its products.
- Storefronts that refuse a run are remembered, so they are no longer retried for each
  subsequent product.
- Sessions are no longer warmed up when the page being requested does not need it, and any page
  already loaded from the main site now counts as warming the session.
- Runs report how much traffic they used in total and per record.
- Progress is logged as records are written.

### 1.0 (2026-08-04)

- Initial release.
- Five scrape modes: product search by keyword, product detail by URL or ID, supplier company
  profile, supplier catalog, and buyer reviews.
- Product records include the full quantity price ladder (or the per-variant price range),
  MOQ, the complete specification sheet, the SKU variant matrix, all images in original
  resolution, lead times, unit weight and dimensions, price term, sales volume and category
  breadcrumb.
- Supplier records include the registered operational address, transaction value, orders in the
  last 6 months, reorder rate, on-time delivery rate, response time, staff counts,
  certifications, customization and QA capabilities, production-line photos, main export
  markets with revenue share, and the leading-factory ranking.
- Reviews include text, star rating, date, buyer country, verified-purchase flag, and a rating
  summary with per-dimension scores and a 1-5 star histogram.
- Optional enrichment attaches product detail, supplier profile and reviews to every search
  result; supplier profiles are fetched once and reused across their products.
- Results stream to the dataset one by one as they are ready, and `maxItems` is enforced on
  every record so a run never exceeds the requested result count.
- Output available as structured JSON or flattened single-level columns for CSV/Excel.