DEV Community: Maksim Lazouski

How to find the 1688 factory behind a product photo (and what to ask before you order)

Maksim Lazouski — Wed, 11 Nov 2026 22:09:52 +0000

You have a photo of a product that sells: from an Amazon listing, a Shopify store, a TikTok Shop video. You want the factory that makes it, and the factory price. Most of those products are made in China and sold wholesale on 1688.com, the marketplace Chinese shops buy from, often for a fraction of the retail price.

1688 has its own search by photo, and it is good. But the site is in Chinese and takes one photo at a time. This guide shows a faster way: 1688 Image Search, a ready-made scraper on Apify that runs 1688's search by photo for a whole list of photo links and returns every match as a table. No 1688 account, no browser extension, no proxy of your own.

Step 1: Collect the photo links

On most shops, right-click the product picture and choose "Copy image address". A product export of your own Shopify or WooCommerce store has a column with them. A picture on your computer works too, as a data:image/jpeg;base64,... link.

What finds the best matches: one product on a plain background, as on a shop's product page. A photo with several products or with people in it finds less. A photo taken from 1688 itself often finds the very offer it came from, and the other sellers of the same product.

Step 2: Run the search

Open the actor, paste the photo links one per line, choose how many pages of matches you want per photo (60 a page, up to 10 pages) and press Start. Turn on English titles if you do not read Chinese.

To see it work first, start from a ready-made task and replace the photo link with your own:

Step 3: Read the table

Each row is one 1688 offer that looks like your photo, best match first: title (and English title), price in CNY and US dollars, the smallest order, units sold, repeat-buyer rate, the supplier, its business type and years on 1688, province and city, the picture and the link. Ads are in the list where 1688 puts them, marked is_ad.

Here is what one photo of an insulated steel cup gave me, first page only (60 matches, 11 Nov 2026):

8 of the 60 were ads.
48 suppliers called themselves manufacturers (生产加工), 3 wholesalers (经销批发).
43 of the 60 were in Jinhua, Zhejiang (Jinhua and Yongkang in the city field). Many products have a home cluster like this, and a supplier far from it is more often a trader.
The smallest order was 1 piece for 37 offers and 2 pieces for 19.
Prices ran from $0.61 to $9.42, with half of them under $1.28.

A quick way to shortlist: drop the ads, keep the manufacturers with a few years on 1688 (33 of the 60 had five or more), and sort by price. Then look at the cheapest ten by eye: very low prices are often a smaller size or a thinner material than your photo.

Step 4: Open your shortlist in full

Turn on Open every match, or paste the offer links of your shortlist into 1688 Product Scraper, and you get the full offer row, about 100 fields: price by quantity, every variant with its price and stock, orders in 30 days, the supplier card, ratings and dropshipping terms.

Four fields of the full row answer questions you should ask before any order:

Field	What it tells you
`cross_border_services`	what the supplier offers for export, such as FBA labels, box marks, foreign-language packaging and instructions
`guarantees`	promises such as "极速开票" (fast invoicing) and "晚发必赔" (pays if it ships late)
`sku_packages`	weight and size of each variant, for a freight estimate
`has_free_sample`	whether a free sample is offered

Step 5: Ask before you order

1688 prices are domestic, factory-gate prices. Two readers of my earlier 1688 guide, one of them a fabric mill, added what the table cannot tell you:

Export packaging, an export invoice and the trip to your forwarder are not in the price. Ask about all three: together they can take half of the saving you see.
Read the units and the specs. The same kind of product can be priced per piece, per metre or per kilogram, and the exact specs often sit in the pictures of the description, not in the text.
A high repeat-buyer rate is not always a factory's. Trading companies that resell many factories' goods can show high numbers too. The business type and the city help here.
Order samples from your best two or three, not only the cheapest. A sample tells you more than any rating.

Run it every week from a Google Sheet

If you keep your products in a spreadsheet, the free n8n template Find 1688 product suppliers from photos with Apify and Google Sheets reads new product photos from a sheet, runs the search, writes the best matches to a second tab and marks each product with its lowest and median price. Each photo is searched once.

What it costs

On Apify's free plan: $0.004 per photo with its first 60 matches, $0.002 per further page of 60, and $0.005 when a run starts. English titles add $0.10 per 1,000 matches, $0.006 a photo. A photo that cannot be read, or that nothing on 1688 looks like, is not charged. Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month, enough for more than 1,000 photos, or about 500 with English titles.

Limits

The matches are 1688's own: what its search by photo shows for the same picture. A product shot from another shop finds similar products; the very same one less often.
Up to 600 matches per photo (10 pages of 60).
Text comes as 1688 gives it: Chinese, with prices in CNY and US dollars beside them.

The actor is 1688 Image Search on Apify. If something is wrong or a field is missing, write on its Issues tab with the photo link.

1688 is a trademark of its owner. This guide and the actor are not affiliated with or endorsed by 1688.com or Alibaba Group.

How to compare Lazada prices across six countries in one table

Maksim Lazouski — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 11:17:11 +0000

Lazada, one of the largest online marketplaces of Southeast Asia, is really six separate sites: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam. Each has its own prices, its own money and often its own language.

If you sell in the region, source products there, or check how a brand is priced from one country to the next, you want the numbers side by side: price, discount, rating, units sold, seller.

By hand that is slow. A search page shows 40 products, a market has thousands, and six sites mean six currencies and several languages to switch between.

This guide shows a faster way: Lazada Product Search Scraper, a ready-made scraper on Apify that turns Lazada search and category pages into one table, with prices also in US dollars and titles in English if you want them. No Lazada account, no browser extension, no proxy of your own.

What you get

For each product of a search or category page:

the title (and in English if you ask for it), brand, link and picture
the price, the price before discount, and the discount in %
the money (SGD, MYR, THB, PHP, IDR or VND), and both prices in US dollars (not for Vietnam)
the rating, number of reviews and units sold
the seller, where the product ships from, and whether it is in stock
its place in the search results, and whether it is sponsored

Step 1: pick the keyword and the country

Type a keyword and choose one of the six countries. English keywords find a lot in every country; in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, try the local word too.

Country	"Phone case"
Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines	phone case
Thailand	เคสโทรศัพท์
Vietnam	ốp lưng

Step 2: run a search

Open the ready-made task Compare phone case prices on Lazada Singapore, change the keyword and the country to yours and press Start.

You can also set the order (relevance, cheapest or most expensive first), a price range in the country's money, and how many products to return: 120 by default, up to 2,000 per search. Export the result as CSV or Excel, or open it in Google Sheets.

Step 3: one search, several countries

The country setting is for keywords. To compare countries in one run, paste search links instead: open the same search on each Lazada site, copy the address of the page and paste it, one per line. A link keeps its own country and filters.

{
    "searches": [
        "https://www.lazada.sg/catalog/?q=power+bank&sort=priceasc",
        "https://www.lazada.com.my/catalog/?q=power+bank&sort=priceasc",
        "https://www.lazada.co.th/catalog/?q=power+bank&sort=priceasc"
    ],
    "maxItemsPerSearch": 80,
    "translateTitles": true
}

Every row says which country it came from. Sort by price_usd and the countries line up. Vietnam is the exception: the European Central Bank publishes no rate for the dong, so rows from Vietnam keep their price in VND only.

Step 4: read the table

Discount: compare price, not discount_percent. A big discount off a high "before" price can still be the dearest offer in the list.
Units sold come rounded, the way Lazada shows them: "6.1K sold" is returned as 6100, with the page's own text beside it.
Sponsored rows are ads. Filter them out to see the plain order of the results.
Position is the product's place in the search. Run the same keyword now and then to see where your product, or a competitor's, ranks.
Location is where the product ships from, so you can tell local sellers from products sent from abroad.

Step 5: titles in English

Turn on English titles and the scraper adds title_en to every product whose title is not in English: Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Malay listings. Titles already in English are left alone and not charged.

If you would rather not pay for it, Google Sheets translates a column for free. If the title is in column B:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(B2, "auto", "en")

Step 6: watch prices and stock every day

Give the run a watch list name and put it on a schedule, for example every morning. The first run returns everything. Every later run with the same name returns only:

products that are new in your search,
products whose price, price before discount, title or stock changed, with the old value next to the new one,
products that left the search. These rows are free.

Rows that did not change are not stored and not charged, so a daily check of a market costs only what changed. The task Get Lazada price changes for a search is set up this way:

{
    "searches": ["https://www.lazada.com.my/catalog/?q=air+fryer&sort=priceasc"],
    "maxItemsPerSearch": 200,
    "watchName": "air fryers MY"
}

Connect the run to Slack, Gmail or Google Drive with Apify's integrations, and the changes come to you.

What it costs

You pay per row the scraper stores:

Row	Price per 1,000 (Apify free plan)
A product	$1.50
An English title (add-on)	$1.00

A run also costs $0.005 to start. A search of 120 products costs $0.18; with English titles for a Thai search, $0.30. You do not pay for searches the scraper could not read, for rows of products that left a search, or for unchanged rows of a watch list. Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month, which is about 3,300 products. On Apify's paid plans the prices per row are lower.

Limits worth knowing

Search and category pages only. The scraper does not open product pages, so there is no full description, variant list or review text.
Up to 2,000 products per search (50 pages of 40), in the order Lazada shows them.
Units sold are rounded, as Lazada shows them.
No US dollars for Vietnam: rows from Vietnam keep VND only.
English titles are machine translation. Brand and model names may come out odd; the original title is always there.

Try it

The scraper is Lazada Product Search Scraper on Apify. If a field you need is missing, write on its Issues tab with the search link.

Lazada is a trademark of its owner. The scraper is not affiliated with or endorsed by Lazada or Alibaba Group.

How to see what things really sell for on Mercari Japan (in English and US dollars)

Maksim Lazouski — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 11:10:51 +0000

Mercari Japan (メルカリ) is Japan's largest marketplace for second-hand goods. Trading cards, anime figures, film cameras, game consoles: Japanese sellers list them there all day, and a lot of what collectors and resellers abroad look for shows up there first.

If you buy in Japan and sell abroad, or you just want to know what your card is worth, the number that matters is not the asking price. It is the sold price: what someone actually paid.

Getting those numbers by hand is slow. Listings are in Japanese, sold items are behind a filter, prices are in yen, and copying a hundred rows into a sheet takes an hour.

This guide shows a faster way: Mercari Japan Scraper, a ready-made scraper on Apify that turns a Mercari Japan search, sold items included, into a table with prices in yen and US dollars and titles in English. No Mercari account, no browser extension, no proxy of your own.

What you get

For each item of a search (or of a seller's list):

the title, and the title in English if you ask for it
the price in yen and in US dollars
the status: on sale, in trade or sold
the condition, and who pays for shipping
brand, category, listing and update time, photos
the bids, for the listings that are auctions

For each item you open in full, also:

the description and every photo
the category path, likes and comments
the shipping method, where it ships from, days to ship
item details such as card rarity, size or model
the seller's ratings (good, normal, bad), star score, number of items and join date

Step 1: choose your keyword

Mercari Japan search works best in Japanese, the language the sellers write in. Brand and model names often work as they are.

What	Keyword
Pokémon cards	ポケモンカード
Anime figures	フィギュア
Film cameras	フィルムカメラ
A game console	Nintendo Switch

The narrower the keyword, the cleaner the price. ポケモンカード brings every card; a card's name, such as ミュウex SAR, brings that card.

Step 2: get the sold prices

Open the ready-made task Track Pokemon card sold prices on Mercari Japan, change the keyword to yours and press Start.

Or set it up yourself. These are the settings that matter:

{
    "searches": ["ミュウex SAR"],
    "status": "sold",
    "sort": "newest",
    "maxItemsPerSearch": 240,
    "translateTitles": true
}

status: sold returns only items that sold.
sort: newest puts the newest first.
maxItemsPerSearch is how many items to return: 120 by default, up to 1,200.
translateTitles adds an English title to every row.

You can put several searches in one run, one per line. Export the result as CSV or Excel, or open it in Google Sheets.

Step 3: work out a fair price

A few habits make the numbers more useful:

Use the median, not the average. One odd price or a bundle of ten cards pulls the average far off. In Google Sheets, =MEDIAN(H2:H241), where H is the price_usd column.
Compare like with like. Filter by condition: "New, unused" and "No noticeable scratches or stains" sell at different prices.
Look at who pays for shipping. shipping_paid_by: seller means the price already covers postage inside Japan.
Read the titles. Bundles (まとめ, セット) and empty boxes (空箱) turn up in searches too.
Keep auctions apart. Their rows carry the bids in an auction field.

Step 4: use the site's own filters

Mercari's search page has filters for price range, category, condition and sold items. Set them on jp.mercari.com, copy the address of the page and paste it as a search. The link keeps its filters, for example:

https://jp.mercari.com/search?keyword=ポケモンカード&status=sold_out&price_min=1000

Step 5: get new listings and price drops every hour

Good items at a good price go fast. To see them as they come, give the run a watch list name and put it on a schedule, for example every hour. The first run returns everything. Every later run with the same name returns only:

new listings in your search,
items whose price, title or status changed, for example from on sale to sold, with the old value next to the new one,
items that are gone. These rows are free.

Rows that did not change are not stored and not charged, so a check every hour costs only what changed. The task Get new Mercari Japan listings and price drops is set up this way. A search sorted by newest listings works best for a watch:

{
    "searches": ["https://jp.mercari.com/search?keyword=ミュウex%20SAR&sort=created_time&order=desc"],
    "maxItemsPerSearch": 120,
    "translateTitles": true,
    "watchName": "mew cards"
}

Connect the run to Slack, Gmail or Google Drive with Apify's integrations, and the changes come to you.

Step 6: check a seller before you buy

Paste a seller's link, or the link of one of their items, and you get the seller's profile: good, normal and bad ratings, star score, items listed, followers and join date, plus up to 300 of their items. That helps when you buy through a buying service and cannot ask the seller yourself.

Most Mercari sellers are private persons, and their public name and ratings are personal data. Collect them only for a purpose the rules that apply to you allow, and do not use them to contact or profile people.

What it costs

You pay per row the scraper stores:

Row	Price per 1,000 (Apify free plan)
A listed item (a search or a seller's list)	$2.00
A full item	$3.00
A seller profile	$1.00
An English title (add-on)	$1.00

A run also costs $0.005 to start. A search of 120 items costs $0.24, or $0.36 with English titles. You do not pay for what the scraper could not read, for rows of items that are gone, or for unchanged rows of a watch list. Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month, which is about 2,500 listed items. On Apify's paid plans the prices per row are lower.

Limits worth knowing

Mercari Japan only, not Mercari US. Prices are in yen, text in Japanese as the sellers wrote it.
Up to 1,200 items per search and 300 per seller, in the order Mercari shows them.
Items sold by Mercari Shops (shops, not people) come in search rows but are not opened one by one.
A deleted item cannot be read, and it is not charged. A sold item can still be read.
English titles are machine translation. Card names and slang may come out odd; the Japanese title is always there.
US dollar prices use the European Central Bank's rate of the day the run started; the rate is in every row.

Try it

The scraper is Mercari Japan Scraper on Apify. If a field you need is missing, write on its Issues tab with the search or item link.

Mercari is a trademark of Mercari, Inc. The scraper is not affiliated with or endorsed by Mercari.

How to keep track of a Xianyu (Goofish) seller's shop and prices

Maksim Lazouski — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 11:01:12 +0000

Xianyu (闲鱼), also called Goofish or Idle Fish, is China's largest marketplace for second-hand goods. Cameras, phones, designer clothes, collectibles: a lot of it shows up there first, often cheaper than anywhere else. Resellers, buying agents and collectors watch certain sellers closely, because good items go fast.

Watching by hand is hard. The site is in Chinese, it is built for the phone app, and a busy shop has hundreds of items that change every day.

This guide shows how to turn a Xianyu seller's shop into a table with Xianyu (Goofish) Item & Seller Scraper, a ready-made scraper on Apify, and how to get a daily list of only what changed: new items, new prices, items that are gone.

What you get

For a seller:

the seller's card: name, province, introduction, followers, number of items, reviews, share of good reviews, credit and verification
up to 240 items of the shop: title, price, category, number of people who want it, photos

For an item you open in full, about 45 fields:

price and original price, shipping fee
the full description and every photo
attributes such as brand, condition and size
views, wants and saves, listing date, state (on sale or not)
20 fields about the seller, and ten more of the seller's items

Step 1: get the seller's link

Open any item of the seller on goofish.com and open the seller's page. Its address looks like https://www.goofish.com/personal?userId=.... You can also just copy the link of one of the seller's items: the scraper reads the item and finds the seller from it.

Step 2: read the shop

Open the ready-made task Track a Xianyu seller's shop and prices, paste your seller links (one per line) and press Start. A shop of 240 items takes about half a minute.

If you need the full item rows (description, attributes, all photos), use Export a Xianyu shop with full item details instead.

Export the result as CSV or Excel, or open it in Google Sheets. Titles come in Chinese; in Google Sheets =GOOGLETRANSLATE(B2, "zh-CN", "en") translates a column.

Step 3: get only what changed, every day

This is where it saves time. Run the same input on a schedule, for example every morning, and give it a watch list name. The first run returns the whole shop. Every later run with the same name returns only:

items that are new in the shop,
items whose price or title changed, with the old value next to the new one,
items that are gone (sold or removed). These rows are free.

Rows that did not change are not stored and not charged, so a daily check of a shop costs only what changed. A changed row looks like this (shortened):

{
    "type": "listing",
    "item_id": "842485579368",
    "title": "实拍 UR专柜正品黄色系镂空编织休闲短款针织毛衣",
    "price": 45,
    "change": "changed",
    "changed_fields": ["price"],
    "previous": {"price": 50}
}

Connect the run to Slack, Gmail or Google Drive with Apify's integrations, and the changes come to you.

Step 4: find more sellers

Every item row names its seller and ten more of the seller's items, and you can ask for the similar items Xianyu shows under an item (up to 30). That is how to grow a list of sellers in your niche without search.

What it costs

You pay per row the scraper stores:

Row	Price per 1,000 (Apify free plan)
A full item	$3.00
A seller card	$1.00
A listed item (a shop's list or similar items)	$0.50

A run also costs $0.005 to start (from 19 November 2026). One seller with 240 listed items costs $0.12. With a watch list you pay only for what changed, plus the start, and rows for items that are gone are free. Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month. On Apify's paid plans the prices per row are lower.

Limits worth knowing

No search by keyword. Xianyu shows search results only to logged-in users, and this scraper never logs in. It works from links you have: sellers and items.
Up to 240 items per seller, in the order the seller's page shows them.
Similar items are Xianyu's choice and change from one look to the next, so they are not part of the watch list.
Text is in Chinese, prices in CNY; many photos are HEIC files.
Many sellers are private persons. Their public profile is personal data: collect it only for a purpose the rules that apply to you allow, and do not use it to contact or profile people.

Try it

The scraper is Xianyu (Goofish) Item & Seller Scraper on Apify. Questions and requests are welcome on its Issues tab.

Xianyu and Goofish are trademarks of their owner. The scraper is not affiliated with or endorsed by Xianyu, Goofish or Alibaba Group.

How to find 1688 suppliers and compare wholesale prices (without reading Chinese)

Maksim Lazouski — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 10:59:59 +0000

1688.com is the wholesale marketplace that Chinese shops and resellers buy from. Many of the factories you find on Alibaba.com or AliExpress also sell there, often for less, because 1688 is built for buyers inside China. If you source products for dropshipping, Amazon FBA or your own shop, 1688 is where you see what a product really costs at the factory gate.

The trouble is getting that information out. The site is in Chinese, search works best with Chinese words, one keyword brings hundreds of offers, and copying prices into a spreadsheet by hand takes an afternoon.

This guide shows a faster way: 1688 Product Scraper, a ready-made scraper on Apify that turns 1688 search results and offer pages into a table you can sort, translate and compare. No 1688 account, no browser extension, no proxy of your own.

What you get

For each search result:

title, and the title in English if you ask for it
price in CNY and in US dollars
price by quantity (the price breaks for larger orders)
units sold and repeat-buyer rate
supplier name, shop link, years on 1688, province and city
picture, link, and whether the result is an ad

For each offer you open in full, about 100 fields:

the lowest and highest price, price by quantity, smallest order
every variant with its price and stock
units sold, orders in the last 30 days, reviews and rating
where it ships from, postage, promised dispatch time
the supplier card: company name, years on 1688, star level, service scores, badges such as factory or TrustPass
dropshipping terms, and the description pictures

Step 1: write your keyword in Chinese

1688 search works best with Chinese words. Translate the product name into Simplified Chinese (Google Translate is fine) and check that the first results look right. A few examples:

Product	Keyword
Phone case	手机壳
Bluetooth earphones	蓝牙耳机
LED strip lights	灯带

No keyword, only a photo of the product? 1688 Image Search finds the 1688 offers that look like it, with the same price and supplier fields. Step by step: How to find the 1688 factory behind a product photo.

Step 2: search and get a supplier list

Open the ready-made task Find 1688 suppliers for phone cases, replace 手机壳 with your keyword and press Start. You get up to 180 offers per keyword (three pages of 60; that is as far as 1688 lets a visitor who is not logged in go). You can put several keywords in one run.

Export the result as CSV or Excel, or open it in Google Sheets.

Step 3: make a shortlist

A few columns do most of the work:

Price and price by quantity: what you would really pay at your order size.
Units sold: a rough sign that the offer is real and moving.
Repeat-buyer rate: buyers who came back. Higher is usually better.
Years on 1688 and province / city: older shops in the regions known for your product (for example Guangdong for electronics) are a good place to start.

Sort, filter out the ads if you want, and keep the 10 to 30 offers worth a closer look.

Step 4: open the shortlist in full

Paste the offer links of your shortlist into the same scraper and switch on the full details. The ready-made task Get 1688 Bluetooth earphone listings with supplier ratings shows what that looks like: price tiers, variants and stock, 30-day orders, the supplier card, ratings and dropshipping terms for each offer.

In our test runs, 100 full offers took a little over two minutes.

Step 5: get the titles in English

Titles and attributes come in Chinese, as 1688 shows them. Turn on English titles and every row gets title_en, a machine translation of the title, for $1.00 per 1,000 rows.

If you would rather not pay for it, Google Sheets translates a column for free. If the title is in column B:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(B2, "zh-CN", "en")

Fill it down and you have English titles next to the original ones.

Step 6: watch prices over time

If you buy the same products again and again, run the search on a schedule (for example every Monday) and give the run a watch list name. The first run returns everything. Every later run with the same name returns only offers that are new or whose price, title or state changed, with the old value next to the new one. Rows that did not change are not stored and not charged.

The task Compare wholesale prices of LED strip lights on 1688 is a good starting point for a price watch.

What it costs

You pay per row the scraper stores, nothing for rows it could not read:

Row	Price per 1,000 (Apify free plan)
A full offer	$3.00
A search result	$0.50
An English title (add-on)	$1.00

One keyword read to the end (180 results) costs $0.09. Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month, which is about 1,600 full offers. On Apify's paid plans the prices per row are lower.

Limits worth knowing

Up to 180 search results per keyword. For more, use several narrower keywords.
Text comes in Chinese. Prices come in CNY and in US dollars, at the European Central Bank's rate of the day.
Descriptions on 1688 are mostly pictures, so the description text is often short.
The supplier's legal details (registration number, capital) are on a separate page and are not read; the row links to it.
1688 sometimes refuses searches for a while. The scraper then waits and tries again; if the refusal lasts, it stops, keeps what it read and charges nothing for the rest.

Try it

The scraper is 1688 Product Scraper on Apify. If a field you need is missing, write on its Issues tab with the offer link.

1688 is a trademark of its owner. The scraper is not affiliated with or endorsed by 1688.com or Alibaba Group.