AI Alibaba Sourcing Agent — Ranked Price Comparison & CSV

Give it a product and get back a ranked sourcing sheet of real Alibaba listings — unit price normalized to your target order size, MOQ and seller verification called out where available, and the best no-MOQ option flagged for a test order. Includes a downloadable CSV.

How it works

This Actor orchestrates Apify's own E-commerce Scraping Tool — a production scraper with residential proxies and full browser rendering — against Alibaba, then uses Gemini to read the real scraped listings and build a normalized, ranked comparison. You get the sourcing analysis; the hard scraping problem is handled by Apify's own battle-tested infrastructure.

Why Alibaba only: we directly tested AliExpress, JD.com, Shein, and Temu as additional sources and dropped all four. JD.com, Shein, and Temu got blocked at the very first step (couldn't even load a search page) even through Apify's own residential-proxy + browser-rendering infrastructure. AliExpress's search step worked, but its per-product detail-page follow-up timed out completely with zero results in repeated testing, including with an extended 8-minute timeout. Rather than advertise sources that reliably return nothing, this Actor sticks to the one that actually and consistently works. More sources will be added if and when they're verified to work.

Important on cost: the underlying Alibaba scraping (browser rendering, residential proxy, product listing events) is billed by apify/e-commerce-scraping-tool directly to your own Apify account, in addition to this Actor's own price below. Use maxListingsPerMarketplace to control that cost.

Tutorial: how to run it

1. Click Try for free (or Start) on this page.
2. Fill in product — or leave the prefilled carry-on-duffel-bag example to see it work immediately.
3. Set targetUnits to your real order size so unit prices are normalized correctly.
4. Click Start and open the Output tab once the run finishes.
5. Read rankedOffers (cheapest first) and bestNoMoqOption, or download the sourcing-sheet.csv from the key-value store.

Common questions, answered directly

How do I compare Alibaba supplier prices for a product?

Give it a product description — it scrapes real Alibaba listings and returns them ranked cheapest-first, normalized to your actual order size.

Is there a tool to find the cheapest Alibaba listing normalized to my order size?

Yes — that's the unitPriceAtTargetUnits field: every offer is converted to a per-unit price at the quantity you actually plan to order, not the seller's default price break.

How do I find a no-MOQ Alibaba supplier for a test order?

The bestNoMoqOption field flags the cheapest listing with no minimum order quantity, so you can validate a product before committing to a bulk order.

What you can use this for

• Product sourcing / dropshipping — find and rank real Alibaba suppliers for a product spec, normalized to your actual order size, instead of eyeballing raw listings.
• Price benchmarking — see the going rate for a product category before negotiating with a supplier.
• Test-order planning — quickly find a no-MOQ option to validate a product before committing to a bulk order.

Input

Field	Description	Default
product	The product to source	carry-on duffel travel bag
targetUnits	Order size to normalize unit prices to	100
marketplaces	Which marketplaces to check (currently alibaba only)	alibaba
maxListingsPerMarketplace	Cap on listings scraped (controls sub-actor cost)	20
model	Gemini model	gemini-3.8-flash
apiKey	Your own Gemini API key (optional — leave blank to use the Actor's key)	—

Output

{
  "product": "carry-on duffel travel bag",
  "targetUnits": 100,
  "listingsScraped": 5,
  "rankedOffers": [
    { "marketplace": "alibaba", "title": "...", "unitPriceAtTargetUnits": 3.45, "currency": "GBP", "moq": null, "sellerVerification": null, "matchConfidence": "exact", "url": "https://..." }
  ],
  "bestNoMoqOption": null,
  "summary": "...",
  "model": "gemini-3.8-flash",
  "verifiedAt": "2026-09-20T12:00:00.000Z"
}

A sourcing-sheet.csv is also written to the run's key-value store, ready to download.

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.25 per sourcing run. This covers the orchestration and AI analysis only — the underlying Alibaba scraping bills separately to your own Apify account via apify/e-commerce-scraping-tool.

Actor recommendations

• 🛒 Online Store Scam Checker — screen a supplier's own storefront for scam risk before you order.
• 🔎 Grounded Research API — the general-purpose version of this Actor's research pipeline, for any cited fact lookup with a schema you define.
• 🏢 Company & Person Verification API — a due-diligence check on a supplier before committing to a bulk order.