Chapter 39 – Alibaba Bot for Scraping Product Price, MOQ, and Supplier Profiles

Stable and sustainable contribution from supply sides to any eCommerce business is a vital thing to succeed. It’s a tough task of course, so on and off identifying the potential suppliers is a must-have to-do-item. It’s not just for diversifying the suppliers, but also it’s a tip to optimize the landed cost and COGS. The question is how to save time to complete this task. Alibaba bot is the answer for you.

In this Chapter, I’ll walk you through how to write an Alibaba bot to help you scrape the potential suppliers and product prices with MOQ. And you can use this bot to automate collecting supplier information and updating the landed cost and COGS data. It can visualize a profit margin at the sourcing stage.

Table of Contents: Alibaba Bot

Research Suppliers, Landed Costs, and COGS

Alibaba, which is a familiar name in the B2B trading sector, lists thousands of supplier information from diversified industries. Basically, it’s very difficult if you can’t find some product supplies from this platform.

As eCommerce sellers, we often walk around among different suppliers to find the most optimal product sourcing cost or landed cost. What’s more, we like to find verified suppliers with more added value, such as free samples, logistic service, and lower min. MOQ requirement.

It’s because this information and data are relevant to product R&D, sustainable supply side, and profit margin. When talking about the profit margin, the landed cost or cost of good sale is highly related to the supply you partner with. And this is one of the primary reasons why an Alibaba bot is necessary. The bot can automatically scrape specific data using some filtering parameters, and consolidate and update intelligent data in your dashboard.

For more details regarding product sourcing, please check out this article

OEM, Private Label, White Label, or Dropshipping – Tips for Product Sourcing for the eCommerce Store

If you like to learn the cost-wise in the eCommerce, please check out these two articles

Selling Well But Be Losing Money? 7 Variable Costs Are Impacting Your Online Store Profit Margin

Chapter 33: Create an eCommerce Profit & Loss Calculator Using OOP

Alibaba Search URL Parameters

I’ll use Beautifulsoup and selenium to scrape the data. First thing first, we would use the search function on the platform. Below is the search URL and there are some parameters I think it’s always very useful.

URL = driver.get(

'https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?IndexArea=product_en&SearchText=' + query + '&page=' + str(page) + '&Country=CN&assessment_company=ASS&param_order=CNTRY-CN&f0=y'

)

  • IndexArea = product_en: It’s the international side of product and supplier information in English
  • SearchText: Here add the keyword
  • Page: The pagination. Usually, I would set 3 pages
  • Country: Select the country of the suppliers
  • assessment_company=ASS: It represents only verified suppliers

SERP Product Data

There are mainly two types of products in the SERP. One type is the business-as-usual product information, and the other type is the promotion data. For the element locators, the pricing elements have different class values because of this.

For the SERP product data, normally we like to collect the product price and MOQ data that can automatically plugin into your dashboard. So you can immediately learn how many suppliers are selling the SKU and a rough profit margin at the early stage. My experience can tell it’s very useful.

Last but not least, some data is also scrapable such as photos, product names, product page URLs, etc.

Product Page Data

BeautifulSoup doesn’t work on the Alibaba product page. So software like selenium is only to scrape the product page data. For me, I would like to fetch the free sample, product variant, and company profile link data. As it’s helpful for the team to follow up on the conversation with the potential ones.

By using selenium to convert the fetched session ID into the textual content, there are one method and three values I recommend you use.

  • Method: get_attribute
  • Scrape the HTML elements: get_attribute(“innerHTML)
  • Fetch the string content: get_attribute(“textContent”)
  • Grab the Href link: get_attribute(“href”)

From the SERP scraping, we have got the product page URL and you can continue to scrape the specific product page data using those URLs you scrape from the SERP.

Full Python Script of Alibaba Bot

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FAQ:

Q1: What is Alibaba Product Scraper?

A: Alibaba Product Scraper is a tool designed for extracting product data from Alibaba, a popular eCommerce platform. It allows users to scrape and collect product information such as title, price, description, images, and more.

Q2: How does Alibaba Product Scraper work?

A: Alibaba Product Scraper uses web scraping techniques to extract data from Alibaba’s product pages. It navigates through the pages, retrieves the desired information, and stores it in a structured format for further analysis or use.

Q3: What can I do with the data scraped by Alibaba Product Scraper?

A: The scraped data can be used for various purposes such as market research, competitive analysis, price comparison, inventory management, lead generation, and more. It provides valuable insights into the products listed on Alibaba’s platform.

Q4: Is Alibaba Product Scraper legal to use?

A: While web scraping is a gray area legally, using Alibaba Product Scraper for personal use or extracting publicly available information is generally considered acceptable. However, it is always advisable to review and comply with Alibaba’s terms of service and any applicable laws or regulations in your jurisdiction.

Q5: Is Alibaba Product Scraper user-friendly?

A: Yes, Alibaba Product Scraper is designed to be user-friendly. It offers a simple and intuitive interface, making it easy for users to navigate and configure the scraping settings according to their requirements.

Q6: Does Alibaba Product Scraper require any technical skills?

A: No, Alibaba Product Scraper is designed to be accessible to users with varying technical skills. You don’t need to have advanced programming knowledge or coding skills to use the tool. However, basic understanding of web scraping concepts can be beneficial.

Q7: Can I scrape multiple product pages at once using Alibaba Product Scraper?

A: Yes, Alibaba Product Scraper supports scraping multiple product pages simultaneously. You can specify the number of pages to scrape or provide a list of URLs to scrape, allowing you to gather data from a large number of product listings efficiently.

Q8: What output formats are supported by Alibaba Product Scraper?

A: Alibaba Product Scraper supports various output formats such as CSV, Excel, JSON, and XML. You can choose the format that best suits your needs for further analysis or integration with other tools or systems.

Q9: Does Alibaba Product Scraper provide regular updates?

A: Yes, Alibaba Product Scraper is regularly updated to ensure compatibility with changes in Alibaba’s website structure and to add new features or enhancements. It is recommended to keep the tool updated to benefit from the latest improvements.

Q10: Is there customer support available for Alibaba Product Scraper?

A: Yes, Alibaba Product Scraper provides customer support to assist users with any queries, issues, or technical difficulties they may encounter. You can reach out to the support team through email or the designated support channels.

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