You have a photo of a product that sells: from an Amazon listing, a Shopify store, a TikTok Shop video. You want the factory that makes it, and the factory price. Most of those products are made in China and sold wholesale on 1688.com, the marketplace Chinese shops buy from, often for a fraction of the retail price.
1688 has its own search by photo, and it is good. But the site is in Chinese and takes one photo at a time. This guide shows a faster way: 1688 Image Search, a ready-made scraper on Apify that runs 1688's search by photo for a whole list of photo links and returns every match as a table. No 1688 account, no browser extension, no proxy of your own.
Step 1: Collect the photo links
On most shops, right-click the product picture and choose "Copy image address". A product export of your own Shopify or WooCommerce store has a column with them. A picture on your computer works too, as a data:image/jpeg;base64,... link.
What finds the best matches: one product on a plain background, as on a shop's product page. A photo with several products or with people in it finds less. A photo taken from 1688 itself often finds the very offer it came from, and the other sellers of the same product.
Step 2: Run the search
Open the actor, paste the photo links one per line, choose how many pages of matches you want per photo (60 a page, up to 10 pages) and press Start. Turn on English titles if you do not read Chinese.
To see it work first, start from a ready-made task and replace the photo link with your own:
Step 3: Read the table
Each row is one 1688 offer that looks like your photo, best match first: title (and English title), price in CNY and US dollars, the smallest order, units sold, repeat-buyer rate, the supplier, its business type and years on 1688, province and city, the picture and the link. Ads are in the list where 1688 puts them, marked is_ad.
Here is what one photo of an insulated steel cup gave me, first page only (60 matches, 11 Nov 2026):
- 8 of the 60 were ads.
- 48 suppliers called themselves manufacturers (生产加工), 3 wholesalers (经销批发).
- 43 of the 60 were in Jinhua, Zhejiang (Jinhua and Yongkang in the city field). Many products have a home cluster like this, and a supplier far from it is more often a trader.
- The smallest order was 1 piece for 37 offers and 2 pieces for 19.
- Prices ran from $0.61 to $9.42, with half of them under $1.28.
A quick way to shortlist: drop the ads, keep the manufacturers with a few years on 1688 (33 of the 60 had five or more), and sort by price. Then look at the cheapest ten by eye: very low prices are often a smaller size or a thinner material than your photo.
Step 4: Open your shortlist in full
Turn on Open every match, or paste the offer links of your shortlist into 1688 Product Scraper, and you get the full offer row, about 100 fields: price by quantity, every variant with its price and stock, orders in 30 days, the supplier card, ratings and dropshipping terms.
Four fields of the full row answer questions you should ask before any order:
| Field | What it tells you |
|---|---|
cross_border_services | what the supplier offers for export, such as FBA labels, box marks, foreign-language packaging and instructions |
guarantees | promises such as "极速开票" (fast invoicing) and "晚发必赔" (pays if it ships late) |
sku_packages | weight and size of each variant, for a freight estimate |
has_free_sample | whether a free sample is offered |
Step 5: Ask before you order
1688 prices are domestic, factory-gate prices. Two readers of my earlier 1688 guide, one of them a fabric mill, added what the table cannot tell you:
- Export packaging, an export invoice and the trip to your forwarder are not in the price. Ask about all three: together they can take half of the saving you see.
- Read the units and the specs. The same kind of product can be priced per piece, per metre or per kilogram, and the exact specs often sit in the pictures of the description, not in the text.
- A high repeat-buyer rate is not always a factory's. Trading companies that resell many factories' goods can show high numbers too. The business type and the city help here.
- Order samples from your best two or three, not only the cheapest. A sample tells you more than any rating.
Run it every week from a Google Sheet
If you keep your products in a spreadsheet, the free n8n template Find 1688 product suppliers from photos with Apify and Google Sheets reads new product photos from a sheet, runs the search, writes the best matches to a second tab and marks each product with its lowest and median price. Each photo is searched once.
What it costs
On Apify's free plan: $0.004 per photo with its first 60 matches, $0.002 per further page of 60, and $0.005 when a run starts. English titles add $0.10 per 1,000 matches, $0.006 a photo. A photo that cannot be read, or that nothing on 1688 looks like, is not charged. Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month, enough for more than 1,000 photos, or about 500 with English titles.
Limits
- The matches are 1688's own: what its search by photo shows for the same picture. A product shot from another shop finds similar products; the very same one less often.
- Up to 600 matches per photo (10 pages of 60).
- Text comes as 1688 gives it: Chinese, with prices in CNY and US dollars beside them.
The actor is 1688 Image Search on Apify. If something is wrong or a field is missing, write on its Issues tab with the photo link.
1688 is a trademark of its owner. This guide and the actor are not affiliated with or endorsed by 1688.com or Alibaba Group.
