Taobao & 1688 Agent Search — CNFans, Hoobuy, OOPBuy Links

What does Taobao & 1688 Agent Search do?

It searches Taobao and 1688 by keyword through China shopping-agent APIs and returns clean product data: the original Chinese title, an English machine translation, the CNY price, the product image, and — the part that saves the most time — ready-to-open links for 9 shopping agents (CNFans, Mulebuy, ACBuy, Hoobuy, OOPBuy, Superbuy, CSSBuy, AllChinaBuy, Sugargoo). No login, no China IP, no browser extension needed.

Why use this Actor?

• Search in English, get English titles back — the agent API translates both ways.
• Build spreadsheets fast: every row ships with links for all major agents, so your list works for any community regardless of which agent people prefer.
• 1688 wholesale mode returns raw numeric offer IDs, direct marketplace URLs, and minimum order quantities — sourcing research without Alibaba's login walls.
• Honest results: if a keyword returns fewer products than you asked for, the run says so explicitly instead of quietly under-delivering.
• No proxy setup: proxies are managed internally (datacenter first, automatic residential escalation only when needed).
• Two independent sources: OOPBuy's search API leads for Taobao and CNFans' for 1688; when one fails or returns nothing for a keyword, the run switches to the other automatically, so one agent having a bad day does not break your workflow. Every row says which source served it.

How much does it cost?

You pay per product returned — nothing else. At $2.50 per 1,000 products, a typical run of 3 keywords × 100 products costs $0.75, and the default first run (1 keyword, 20 products) costs $0.05. Proxies and compute are included in that price.

Input

Field	Type	Description
keywords	array	Search terms, one per line. English works; Chinese gives the best recall.
platform	string	taobao (retail, default) or 1688 (wholesale).
maxResults	integer	Products per keyword (default 50, max 2,000).
generateAgentLinks	boolean	Include the 9-agent link matrix on every product (default true).
searchProvider	string	auto (default: OOPBuy first on Taobao, CNFans first on 1688, failover to the other), cnfans, or oopbuy.

Output

One dataset item per product:

{
    "platform": "1688",
    "productId": "1024518226585",
    "rawUrl": "https://detail.1688.com/offer/1024518226585.html",
    "titleCn": "LULU家同款平替scuba连帽华夫格休闲卫衣夹克",
    "titleEn": "Lulu's Same Style Affordable Alternative Scuba Hooded Waffle Casual Sweatshirt Jacket",
    "priceCny": 58.0,
    "imageUrl": "https://cbu01.alicdn.com/img/ibank/example.jpg",
    "sales": 1200,
    "minOrderQuantity": 2,
    "agentLinks": {
        "cnfans": "https://cnfans.com/product?id=1024518226585&platform=ALI_1688",
        "mulebuy": "https://mulebuy.com/product/?shop_type=ali_1688&id=1024518226585",
        "acbuy": "https://www.acbuy.com/product?id=1024518226585&source=AL",
        "hoobuy": "https://hoobuy.com/product/0/1024518226585",
        "oopbuy": "https://oopbuy.com/goods/details?id=1024518226585&channel=1688",
        "superbuy": "https://www.superbuy.com/en/page/buy/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdetail.1688.com%2Foffer%2F1024518226585.html",
        "cssbuy": "https://www.cssbuy.com/item-1688-1024518226585.html",
        "allchinabuy": "https://www.allchinabuy.com/en/page/buy/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdetail.1688.com%2Foffer%2F1024518226585.html",
        "sugargoo": "https://www.sugargoo.com/products?productLink=https%3A%2F%2Fdetail.1688.com%2Foffer%2F1024518226585.html"
    },
    "keyword": "连帽衫",
    "source": "cnfans",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-09-07T14:30:00.000Z"
}

Tips and tricks

• Use Chinese keywords for Taobao. English works and titles come back translated, but the upstream search maps some English words loosely — hoodie on Taobao returns mostly T-shirts, while 连帽衫 returns hooded sweatshirts almost exclusively. Multi-word English terms (denim jacket, cargo pants, backpack) work well.
• Every keyword returns something. The search is semantic: a nonsense or misspelled keyword still returns a handful of loosely related products, and those are billed like any other result. Check your spelling before large runs.
• Taobao product IDs are opaque tokens — that's how the upstream feed serves them, on every agent. Those rows still include a working link for the agent that issued the token (CNFans and Mulebuy for CNFans results, OOPBuy for OOPBuy results), while rawUrl and the other agents' links are null. 1688 always returns real numeric IDs with the full 9-agent link matrix.
• sales and minOrderQuantity are 1688-only. Taobao search results carry no sales data, so both fields are null on Taobao instead of a misleading constant. OOPBuy reports monthly sales but no minimum order quantity, so minOrderQuantity is null on OOPBuy-sourced rows.
• Prices are always CNY (the marketplace currency) — convert downstream if needed.
• Searching Weidian by keyword is not supported by any agent API; Weidian is link-only across the ecosystem.
• Keep maxResults at what you actually need — billing is per product returned.
• If a search page fails on every provider, the run continues and lists the failed pages under the ERRORS key of the run's key-value store; the final status message reports the shortfall per keyword.

Integrations

Connect the dataset to Google Sheets, Zapier, Make, or fetch it via the Apify API (GET /v2/datasets/{datasetId}/items?format=csv) to feed spreadsheet-builder workflows, Discord bots, or price monitors.