Sourcing agents, dropshippers and procurement teams ask Apex Automation Team for supplier lists more than any other e-commerce dataset. Alibaba and AliExpress expose a lot of useful public data — but they are also two of the more demanding targets to scrape reliably.
Fields worth collecting
- Store name, store ID and store URL
- Supplier type (manufacturer, trading company), years on platform, verified/gold status
- Ratings, review counts and positive-feedback rate
- Main product divisions/categories and top products with prices and MOQ
- Response rate and on-time delivery where shown
- Location (province/country)
Pitfalls
Geo-personalised pages: prices and availability change by visitor country; we pin the locale explicitly. Heavy JavaScript and lazy loading: product grids render after scroll; where possible we call the underlying JSON endpoints instead of scrolling a browser. Anti-bot layers: aggressive parallelism triggers slider captchas; we keep concurrency low per session and reuse warmed sessions. Duplicate suppliers: one company can run several stores; we deduplicate by company name and licence details when available.
Delivery
Suppliers are delivered as a multi-sheet Excel: one sheet of suppliers, one of their top products, one of category counts, ready for filtering. Custom filters — MOQ under X, ships-from-country, category — are applied on request.
Ready vs custom
The pre-scraped AliExpress and Alibaba supplier directories are instant and start from $0.1–$0.5 per row. A custom sourcing scraper with your filters and a monthly refresh is quoted after a free feasibility test. Send us your product category to get a sample.
Quick checklist
- Pin the locale/currency before collecting prices
- Capture supplier type, years on platform and verified status
- Record MOQ and price ranges per top product
- Deduplicate suppliers that run multiple stores
- Deliver suppliers and products as separate sheets
Frequently asked
Can you filter suppliers by MOQ or ship-from country?
Yes. Custom runs accept filters such as MOQ under a threshold, category, ship-from country and minimum rating.
How fresh is the supplier data?
Historical packs are instant; fresh packs are re-scraped on order so ratings and prices are current.