Amazon vs AliExpress Product Scraper: Which One for Sourcing and Price Tracking

Amazon and AliExpress scrapers both take a keyword and return a list of products with prices, but they get used for opposite ends of the same sourcing workflow. AliExpress is where the search usually starts, looking for a product to source and resell. Amazon is where it usually ends, checking whether that product already sells and at what price. Neither one substitutes for the other, and the field each returns to support its own job (order count on one side, Best Sellers Rank on the other) reflects that split.

Try it live: Amazon Product Scraper, 8 Marketplaces. Pay only for results delivered, no result no charge.

This post compares Amazon Product Scraper and AliExpress Scraper on marketplace coverage, demand signal, and price, then covers where Shopify Store Scraper fits a different job entirely.

Field-by-Field Comparison

	Amazon	AliExpress
Input	ASIN or keyword	Keyword or category
Marketplaces covered	8: US, UK, DE, FR, JP, IN, CA, AU	1, global storefront
Price fields	Current price	Current price, original price, discount percentage
Demand signal	Best Sellers Rank	Order count
Rating and review count	Yes	Yes
Product variants	Yes, colour and size with individual prices	Not returned
Official API	None	Restricted affiliate API only, requires approval
Price per 1,000 results	$1.00	$2.50 ($0.0025/product)

Where Each One Is Built For a Different Job

Amazon’s edge is Best Sellers Rank and multi-marketplace reach. BSR is Amazon’s own internal ranking of how well a product sells within its category, updated frequently, and nothing on AliExpress has an equivalent. Combined with coverage across eight national marketplaces from a single actor, Amazon is the stronger source for tracking how a product is actually performing where it’s already listed, or for checking price and rank across multiple countries at once. It’s also the cheaper of the two per result, at $1 versus AliExpress’s $2.50 per 1,000.

One real limitation worth knowing before relying on it: Amazon geo-locks pricing to sessions with accepted cookie consent and a matching regional IP. Price extraction works reliably on warm residential sessions, but a cold run can come back with missing prices on some SKUs.

AliExpress’s edge is order count as a sourcing signal. Order count is a running total of how many times a listing has actually sold, and it’s the field the dropshipping and sourcing use case is built around: a high order count alongside a healthy margin between AliExpress’s price and a target resale price is the standard signal for a viable product to source. Amazon’s BSR tells you how well something sells on Amazon specifically; AliExpress’s order count tells you whether it sells at all before you’ve committed to sourcing it anywhere.

Building a Sourcing Pipeline

A common workflow runs AliExpress first to find candidate products by order count and price, then checks the same or similar products on Amazon to see whether demand and pricing there justify sourcing it:

import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient

apify = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])

def pull(actor_slug, **kwargs):
    run = apify.actor(actor_slug).call(run_input={"maxItems": 100, **kwargs})
    return list(apify.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items())

candidates = pull("themineworks/aliexpress-products", keywords="wireless earbuds", sortBy="orders")
high_demand = [p for p in candidates if p.get("orderCount", 0) > 1000]

for product in high_demand[:20]:
    amazon_check = pull("themineworks/amazon-products", keywords=product["title"], marketplace="amazon.com", maxProductsPerSearch=3)
    if amazon_check:
        print(f"{product['title'][:50]}: AliExpress ${product['price']} -> Amazon BSR {amazon_check[0].get('bestSellersRank')}")

The two actors don’t share a schema, since they’re built around different platforms with different fields, so matching products between them works on title similarity or a manually maintained product list rather than a shared ID.

Which One for Which Job

Sourcing and dropshipping research starts with AliExpress. Order count and discount percentage are the fields the decision actually runs on, and neither exists on Amazon’s side.

Competitor and own-listing price tracking on Amazon is Amazon’s job specifically, especially across multiple marketplaces at once, where BSR and variant-level pricing give a fuller picture than AliExpress’s single global storefront can.

Validating a sourcing candidate before committing means running both: AliExpress for the supply-side signal, Amazon for the demand-and-competition signal on the marketplace the product would actually be resold on.

Where Shopify Store Scraper Fits Instead

Shopify Store Scraper isn’t a third option for the same job as Amazon or AliExpress, it answers a different question. Both of the marketplace scrapers search across many sellers for products matching a keyword. Shopify Store Scraper does the opposite: given one specific store’s domain, it returns that store’s entire catalogue, vendor, type, tags, variants, SKUs, and stock, by reading the public /products.json feed every Shopify store exposes. There’s no keyword search involved, because the use case is different: monitoring one known competitor’s full catalogue and pricing, not discovering products across a marketplace. It’s also the only one of the three that needs no browser at all, since it’s reading a static public feed rather than rendering or parsing a search results page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is cheaper for tracking the same product over time?

Amazon, at $1 per 1,000 results against AliExpress’s $2.50. Running either on a schedule to track price changes costs proportionally the same multiple.

Does either require login or an API key?

No. Both work from public listing and search pages with no login, cookies, or API key required. Neither Amazon nor AliExpress offers an unrestricted public API for this kind of product data.

Can I get Amazon data from every country in one run?

Only by running the actor once per marketplace input, one of the eight supported (amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, .fr, .co.jp, .in, .ca, .com.au). A single run targets one marketplace at a time.

Is AliExpress order count a reliable demand signal?

It’s a reasonable proxy, not a guarantee. A high order count means the listing has sold before, but doesn’t account for how long it’s been live, seasonal demand shifts, or whether a similar product would perform the same on a different resale platform. Cross-checking against Amazon BSR for the same product category is a useful second signal before committing to source it.

What does Shopify Store Scraper cost compared to the other two?

$2 per 1,000 products, between Amazon’s $1 and AliExpress’s $2.50. Since it returns a store’s full catalogue rather than search results, the comparison isn’t really about per-result price, it’s about whether the job is marketplace search (Amazon, AliExpress) or single-store catalogue extraction (Shopify).