Amazon to 1688 Supplier Finder
An Amazon seller picks a best seller and clicks Search 1688. The bot finds matching suppliers and saves their prices and links.
Client: An Amazon seller
- per product, not 3 hours a day
- <1 min
- supplier matches per search
- 70+
- Amazon stores built in
- 16
The client's last developer quit after one day: “1688 has no official API, and it can't be scraped with Selenium. I tried the whole day.”
The problem
An Amazon seller sources best sellers from 1688, China's biggest wholesale site. By hand, that meant saving each product photo, uploading it to 1688, scrolling the matches and copying supplier prices into a spreadsheet. About 3 hours a day. And 1688 hides everything behind a login and blocks most bots.
What I built
A two-part system with a simple dashboard on the seller's Mac:
- 1Finds best sellers in any category and subcategory
- 2One click on “Search 1688” searches by the product photo
- 3Collects each supplier's price and link into a CSV
The hard part
In testing, 1688 caught both Selenium and Playwright. So the bot uses a browser that looks like a normal person's, with the seller's own login, and moves at a human pace. After delivery, 1688 changed its page layout, and the bot was rebuilt to read the new one.
The results
- Under a minute per product, not hours of copy and paste
- 70+ supplier matches in a single search
- 16 Amazon stores built in, from the US to Japan
- Tested live by the client before approval