Amazon to 1688 Supplier Finder: 3 Hours Down to Under a Minute
Anas Yaseen
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. It took 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:
It finds best sellers in any Amazon category and subcategory
One click on "Search 1688" searches 1688 by the product photo
It collects each supplier's price and link into a CSV
The hard part
In testing, 1688 caught both Selenium and Playwright. So the bot drives a real browser with the seller's own login and moves at a human pace. After delivery, 1688 changed its page layout, and I rebuilt the bot to read the new one.
Results
Under a minute per product instead of hours of copy and paste
70+ supplier matches in a single search
16 Amazon stores built in, from the US to Japan
The client tested it live before approving
Tech: Python, nodriver, curl_cffi, BrowserForge, Streamlit
Full case study: https://mranas.dev/work/amazon-1688-supplier-finder
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Posted Oct 19, 2026
An Amazon seller spent about 3 hours a day finding 1688 suppliers by hand, and their last developer said 1688 couldn't be automated. Now the seller clicks "Search 1688" on any best seller and gets 70+ supplier matches with prices and links in under a minute.
