AliExpress scraper API
An AliExpress scraper API that returns items for a keyword with sale price and original price, discount percentage, star rating, orders sold, store name and link, promo chips and image — billed per delivered item.
$0.001 per delivered item · $2 free every month · Failed runs never billed
$ curl $QD/aliexpress_search/run \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $QD_API_KEY" \
-d '{"query": "running shoes", "country": "us", "currency": "USD", "max_results": 60}'
{ "status": "done", "count": 60,
"results": [
{
"product_id": "…",
"title": "…",
"price": "…",
"price_value": … } ],
"cost": 0.06 }
# 60 items × $0.001 · nothing delivered, nothing charged
What an AliExpress scraper API does
AliExpress hydrates its search page from an embedded payload, which is good news: the numbers you see are in the page, not assembled by a script you would have to run. The catch is that the payload is a JavaScript literal whose outer keys are unquoted, and the item list hangs off a module id that changes between builds.
The parser cuts the payload from its first quoted key and then locates the item list by shape rather than by path, so a layout reshuffle moves the node without breaking the collector. Orders sold and discount percentage come through as AliExpress publishes them.
What one item looks like
Every delivered item carries these fields. Nullable means the source did not publish it — the field stays empty instead of being guessed.
| Field | Type | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
rank | integer | 1-based position across pages. |
page | integer | Search page the row came from. |
product_id | string | AliExpress product id. |
title | string | Item title. |
price | string · nullable | Sale price as shown. |
price_value | number · nullable | Numeric sale price. |
currency | string · nullable | Currency code. |
original_price | string · nullable | Pre-discount price. |
discount_percent | number · nullable | Discount as a percentage. |
rating | number · nullable | Star rating (1–5). |
orders | string · nullable | Orders sold as shown ("1,000+ sold"). |
store | string · nullable | Store name. |
store_url | string · nullable | Store URL. |
ships_from | string · nullable | Shipping selling point when present. |
selling_points | string[] | Promo chips on the card. |
image | string · nullable | Image URL. |
url | string | Item URL. |
Inputs
The whole request. Anything you leave out falls back to the default shown in the catalog.
| Input | Type | Required | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
query | string | yes | What to search, e.g. "running shoes". |
currency | string | no | Price currency, e.g. USD or EUR. |
country | string | no | ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code — picks the local site AND the proxy exit (default us). |
max_results | integer | no | How many items to deliver at most (1–250). You pay only for delivered items. |
Pricing
AliExpress scraper API pricing
$0.001 per delivered item. A run that delivers nothing costs nothing: blocked pages, challenges and retries are on us, and the $2 monthly allowance covers about 2,000 items before you spend anything.
Pay as you go
- $2 free credit / month
- 60 requests / min
- List unit prices
Starter
- $15 free credit / month
- 300 requests / min
- 10% off unit prices
Growth
- $50 free credit / month
- 600 requests / min
- 20% off unit prices
Scale
- $250 free credit / month
- 1,200 requests / min
- 30% off unit prices
Same wallet, same key and same $2 monthly allowance as every other Data API. Prices are launch pricing read live from the billing config — GET /v1/scraper/collectors returns the price your key actually pays.
Integration
One POST, typed rows
Base URL https://api.quanticdata.io/v1, Bearer auth, the same key as every other Data API. Endpoint: POST /v1/.
curl -X POST https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scraper/collectors/aliexpress_search/run \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $QD_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"query":"running shoes","country":"us","currency":"USD","max_results":60}'
What people build with the AliExpress scraper API
Three shapes of work this endpoint was designed around.
Sourcing research
Compare unit price, discount and orders sold across suppliers for the same product.
Dropshipping catalogues
Collect candidate items with store, rating and shipping chips attached.
Price benchmarking
Set a floor for a category by watching what the marketplace actually charges.
AliExpress scraper API versus rolling your own
The differences that actually cost time when you build this in-house.
| DIY scraper | This collector | |
|---|---|---|
| Payload path | Hardcoded, breaks on the next build | Item list located by shape |
| Discount | Computed by hand from two prices | Returned as published |
Public demand data, and where it comes from
AliExpress publishes an affiliate/open platform API built around promotion and commission, serving the affiliate catalogue rather than the search page. For product research the gap is the orders figure and the live sale price in the position AliExpress actually served them — properties of the results page, not of a promotional catalogue.
That orders field is why this collector exists at all. Almost no marketplace publishes a cumulative units-sold number next to every listing, which makes AliExpress one of the few public sources of something close to demand data at scale. Paired with rating and store it supports genuine research rather than guesswork.
Limits, currency and the legal bit
Up to 250 items per run. The item node is located by shape rather than by a fixed path in the page's hydration payload, so an internal reshuffle at AliExpress does not silently empty your dataset. Throughput is your plan's rate limit rather than anything about the collector: 60 requests/minute on pay-as-you-go, up to 1,200 on the top tier.
Pin currency on anything you will compare over time. AliExpress quotes in the visitor's currency, so an unpinned series drifts with exchange rates and records price movement that never happened.
Collecting publicly visible data is generally lawful in most jurisdictions, and courts have repeatedly declined to treat reading a public page as unauthorised access. AliExpress's terms restrict automated access, and store names can be personal data where the seller is an individual. None of this is legal advice — get some for your actual use case.
Can I choose the currency?
Yes — pass currency (USD, EUR…) and prices come back in it, both as text and as a number.
Are orders sold exact?
They are what AliExpress prints on the card, which is a rounded band ("1,000+ sold"). The field is returned verbatim so you can see the rounding rather than inherit a false precision.
Is there a free AliExpress scraper API?
Every account gets $2 of credit every month with no card, which is about 2,000 delivered items on this endpoint at $0.001 each. It renews monthly, and a run that delivers nothing is never billed — so a failed or blocked attempt does not eat the allowance.
How much does one run cost?
Multiply the rows you actually receive by $0.001. A run capped at 250 items — the maximum for this collector — costs $0.25 if every row comes back, and less when the source has fewer. Volume tiers take up to 30% off, and GET /v1/scraper/collectors returns the price your key actually pays.
Is the orders number reliable?
It is the cumulative figure the listing itself displays, delivered as an integer rather than a parsed display string. Treat it as the platform's own claim rather than an audited number — but it is published per listing at a scale nothing else matches, which is what makes it useful for trend work.
Will a layout change break my pipeline?
The listing data comes from a JSON payload embedded in the page, and the item node is found by its shape rather than by a hard-coded path. That is specifically to survive the reshuffles that break path-based scrapers.
Run the AliExpress scraper API now
$2 of free credit every month, no card. Your key returns its own prices from GET /v1/scraper/collectors.