Alibaba, 1688 and Taobao: where to look for a supplier

The names, and what each one is for

Alibaba.com, 1688.com, Taobao and Tmall belong to one group; Made-in-China.com belongs to another. From outside China they look like variations on a single idea — a catalogue, a seller, a chat window. They are built for different customers, and that is worth knowing before you set a price on one against a price on another.

Some of them face outward, towards buyers who are not in China. Others face inward, at Chinese wholesalers and Chinese consumers. The language of the site is the visible difference. The ones that matter more are invisible from the product page: how the money is settled, who is entitled to take the goods across the border, and what documents exist at the end of it.

Alibaba.com: the window that faces outward

Alibaba.com was built for cross-border trade and everything about it points that way. The interface and the correspondence are in English, sellers are practised at export paperwork, and payment runs through channels a foreign company can actually use.

That convenience is priced in. A seller listing there answers in English across time zones, handles export declarations and pays for the placement. You will meet trading companies alongside factories, and the reason is structural rather than sinister: an English-language sales desk is a standing cost, and a workshop that sells out its capacity to Chinese wholesalers has no reason to carry it.

For a first purchase this is a sound place to start — predictable, documented, with dispute machinery written into the platform’s own rules. Read those rules before you rely on them: what an escrow arrangement covers, on what evidence and inside what window, is set by the platform rather than by your contract with the seller.

Where it starts to chafe is repeat buying. Once you know the product and the supplier, the distance between the export price and the domestic one turns into a line in your cost sheet.

1688: the domestic wholesale market

1688.com is the same ecosystem turned inward. Its customers are Chinese wholesalers and Chinese retailers buying to resell at home, so the prices track the domestic market rather than the export one. The same item can sit well below the price it carries on Alibaba.com.

The constraints follow from the same fact. The site and the seller correspondence are in Chinese. Payment is designed around Chinese payment methods and a Chinese bank account. Delivery is quoted to an address inside China. And selling abroad in a company’s own name is a separate registration in China: a wholesaler whose customers have all been domestic has had no reason to obtain it, so the seller may be in no position to file an export declaration at all.

That declaration is not a formality you can skip. Without it there is no evidence that the goods left China lawfully, and a hole in the file the customs authority at the other end will be reading.

Hence the arrangement that grew up around the platform: the goods are bought on the domestic market, delivered to a warehouse inside China, consolidated there, and exported by a company that does hold the right, under an agency arrangement. It is a legitimate route rather than a workaround — and it needs somebody on the ground in China, which the platform does not supply.

Since October 2025 an agency export filing has to disclose the company that actually produced and sold the goods. The paperwork has to describe the chain as it really is, so who buys from whom is a question to settle before the money moves rather than after.

Machine translation of a 1688 page creates a false sense of clarity. The specification, the minimum order quantity and the seller’s own conditions are the parts that translate worst — and they are exactly what decides what turns up at the warehouse.

Taobao and Tmall: retail

Taobao is a retail marketplace for Chinese consumers; Tmall is the part of it where brands run official stores. Prices are retail, quantities are single units, and a seller aiming at a domestic shopper has no reason to hold export paperwork or to issue an invoice a foreign importer can use.

They earn their place a different way — as reconnaissance. You can see how the product is presented at retail in China, which specifications sellers are willing to put in writing, what buyers complain about in the reviews, and where the domestic retail price sits before anything is exported. As a supply channel for a company buying a batch, they do not work.

Made-in-China and the other export directories

Made-in-China.com, Global Sources and sites like them are export directories rather than marketplaces in the Alibaba sense. They lean towards industrial goods and manufacturers, and the workflow is closer to old-fashioned sourcing: you find a company, you write to it, and the deal is negotiated in correspondence instead of assembled in a shopping cart.

Be clear about what they change and what they do not. A listing on any directory is a paid placement plus whatever screening that particular site carries out, and screening is not a factory audit. The business licence, the export registration and the plant behind the address still have to be established on your side, whichever site the company was found on.

Why the domestic price is lower

The gap between a 1688 price and an export quote reads like a discount somebody has been keeping from you. It is not. The two numbers are prices for two different transactions.

A domestic sale ends at a Chinese warehouse, settles in yuan through Chinese payment rails, is invoiced with a Chinese tax invoice — the fapiao — and needs no export documents whatsoever. An export sale adds the customs declaration, the commercial documents a foreign buyer needs, a contract drafted to survive being read in another jurisdiction, and the tax treatment that goes with exporting rather than selling at home. Somebody does that work, and the price is where it shows up.

The second half of the answer is that a listing price is a price inside China, not a landed cost. Between the product page and your warehouse sit inland haulage to the port or the terminal, export clearance, freight and insurance, and then the import charges in the country of destination.

For goods entering Russia and the wider Eurasian Economic Union those charges are calculated on the customs value: it starts from the price you paid and takes in the cost of moving the goods as far as the Union’s border, and the customs value takes in the cost of moving the goods as far as the Union’s border. Duty is applied to that figure. Import VAT is applied to the customs value plus the duty — from 1 January 2026 at a base rate of 22 per cent, with a reduced rate for certain categories of goods. An importer registered for VAT on the general tax regime deducts that VAT afterwards; a company on the simplified regime has no deduction and carries it as cost.

Setting a 1688 price against a quote from a supplier in your own country compares two unlike things: a price at a warehouse in China against a delivered, duty-paid price at home. Put both on the same basis before you draw a conclusion from the difference.

Who is actually selling

Here is what no platform shows you: the seller in the listing, the plant that makes the goods and the company whose bank account you pay into can be three separate businesses. The shop window belongs to a trading agent, the goods are made in a factory in the next province, and the invoice arrives from a third entity again.

None of that is fraud in itself — layered selling is an ordinary way for trade to be organised in China. It does mean two things for you. Your price contains a margin whose size you do not know. And when a batch goes wrong, your contract is with one company while the goods were made by another, which decides who you can hold to anything.

• What to check firstWhether the company name on the business licence matches the name on the payment details you were sent. A mismatch is not a verdict, but it needs an explanation you find convincing.
• The breadth of the catalogueA factory makes a narrow group of things. A shop window running from furniture through electronics to textiles belongs to a trading company, whatever the profile page says.
• The answer to a technical questionAsk about the material grade, the tolerance, the tooling, the minimum quantity for a change to the design. A manufacturer answers from its own shop floor; an intermediary goes away to check with colleagues and comes back tomorrow.
• Platform badges and ratingsThey mean what they say and nothing beyond it: the seller has been listed for a while and has no mass of complaints against it. They do not establish that a plant exists or that the company may export in its own name.

What this means when the buyer is a company

Platforms are a good instrument for finding and a poor one for verifying. Almost anything can be found on them; who you are dealing with cannot be read off a product card.

So the order of work runs the other way round from the way it feels. Shortlist on the platform, then — before the first payment — establish the legal entity, the right to export and the manufacturing behind the address. A good part of that you can do from your desk, and there is a separate piece here on how. Past it come the things that do not happen remotely: a technical conversation in Chinese, and somebody standing in the workshop.

The other thing to settle early is who exports. If the seller cannot file the declaration, the export leg has to be designed into the deal from the start: which company signs the contract with you, which one is named as the consignor, whose name is on the invoice your import file will be built from. Working that out after the deposit has gone is what turns a cheap purchase into an expensive one.