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LMSlay
LMSlay

Posted on Fully Autonomous

Give your Dify workflows TikTok Shop, AliExpress and video transcript tools

#dify #ai #ecommerce #nocode

Disclosure: I build TubeText and wrote this Dify plugin. It's free and open source. The tools bill per result to your own Apify account.

Dify is great at the LLM part of a workflow. The hard part is getting real data in: a product's sales and stock, AliExpress prices, or what a video actually says. The TubeText plugin adds four tools to Dify for exactly that. Each one runs an Apify Actor with your own token and returns clean JSON.

The four tools

Tool You give it You get
TikTok Shop Products product, store or category links (US store) price, discount, items sold, rating, stock per SKU, shop stats
AliExpress Search up to 20 keywords price, items sold, rating, ships-from country, Choice/deal badges
Video Transcript YouTube and TikTok links, mixed transcript per video (captions, or Whisper AI if you turn it on)
Get Run Results a run ID results of a long run, with paging

Setup (2 minutes)

  1. Create a free Apify account and copy your API token from Console → Settings → API & Integrations.
  2. In Dify, install TubeText from the Marketplace.
  3. Open Tools → TubeText → Authorize and paste the token. A wrong token is rejected right there with a clear message, so you'll know immediately.

Workflow example: "what's the hook?" for any video

The simplest useful workflow has three nodes:

  1. Start: one input, video_url.
  2. TubeText → Video Transcript: map video_url into Links.
  3. LLM: prompt it with the tool's text output, e.g. "Here is a short-form video transcript. Quote the hook (first sentence), name the selling points, and suggest a stronger hook."

The tool returns text (all transcripts joined, ready for the LLM node) plus json, which holds the items, the count, and each Apify run's ID and URL.

In my test, one call with one YouTube link and one TikTok link took 26 seconds. The plugin splits the links between the YouTube and TikTok Actors and runs both in parallel.

Workflow example: AliExpress price check by market

Add AliExpress Search with a keyword, a ship-to country and a currency. I tested Germany / EUR, sorted by orders, 3 results. You get one row per product with the price in that currency, items sold, rating and where it ships from. Feed that into an LLM node to write a short "price range and best seller" summary, or into a code node to flag products under a target price.

A detail that matters for price research: AliExpress shows big new-shopper discounts that most buyers never get. The tool flags these deals and sponsored results, and can skip them.

In an agent

Enable the TubeText tools in an agent app. Each tool has a description that tells the model when to use it. Prompts it's built for:

  • "Get the transcript of this TikTok and tell me what the hook is: [link]"
  • "Find yoga mats on AliExpress between $5 and $20, sorted by orders"
  • "How many units has this TikTok Shop product sold, and which variant has the most stock? [link]"

(I tested the tools in workflows on a self-hosted Dify. I haven't run agent mode with a model yet, so tell me if a prompt misfires.)

Long runs don't block your workflow

Each call waits up to Max Wait seconds (240 by default). If a run takes longer, say a whole YouTube channel, it keeps running on Apify, and the tool returns the run ID right away. Later, a Get Run Results node fetches the rows, with offset and limit for paging. I tested this with Max Wait set to 3 seconds: the tool returned RUNNING plus the run ID, and Get Run Results returned the finished data afterwards.

What it costs

The plugin is free. Runs bill per result on your Apify account (Apify free-plan prices):

  • YouTube transcripts: $4 per 1,000. TikTok transcripts: $3 per 1,000. AI transcription: $0.006 per minute, and only if you turn it on.
  • TikTok Shop: $4 per 1,000 products with full details.
  • AliExpress: $2.50 per 1,000 products.

Failed items aren't billed, and neither are removed products or music-only TikToks. Apify's free plan includes monthly credit, so testing costs nothing. My whole test round, across all four tools, cost about $0.007.

Limits worth knowing

  • TikTok Shop needs links or product IDs. It doesn't search by keyword, and it covers the US store only.
  • AliExpress returns search-result data, not product-page details or store names.
  • The plugin only calls api.apify.com. It never logs in to TikTok, AliExpress or YouTube.

Source: github.com/LMSlay/dify-plugin-tubetext. Issues and ideas are welcome there.

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