Alibaba RFQ Leads AI: Buying Requests Matched to Your Products on the Apify Store →

How to find Alibaba buying leads for your products — export buying leads matched, translated and ready to quote

Tutorial article for the Apify blog guest program, dev.to, Medium and Hashnode. Drafted with the listing; refreshed with the first real platform run by /actor-marketing, then published by the owner (URL into brief.json → marketing.links).

The problem

Every day buyers post requests for quotation (RFQs) on Alibaba Sourcing: "1,200 embroidered hoodies, 320 gsm, CIF Manzanillo, target USD 7.50". For an exporter in Tiruppur, Ho Chi Minh City or Istanbul those requests are the warmest leads there are — the buyer has already said what, how many and where. The catch is the reading. A keyword search returns every request that mentions the word: closed ones with no quote seats left, quantities far below your MOQ, products you do not make, and a good share written in Spanish, Portuguese, French or Arabic. Reading, translating and drafting a reply takes about six minutes a request; a supplier who checks 50 requests a day spends most of a working day before sending a single quote — and the first quotes are the ones buyers read.

The raw Alibaba RFQ scrapers on Apify ($0.002–$0.03 a row) solve the copying, not the reading: they hand you all 50 rows. Alibaba RFQ Leads AI keeps the ones worth quoting today.

Step by step

Open the Actor and click Try it. The form is pre-filled with six sample RFQs and a sample garment exporter's profile. Press Start: in under 10 seconds the dataset shows five buying leads, best first — the US t-shirt request on top (fit 95, buyer hot, quote today), the closed request filtered out for free, the tote-bag request marked cold because the exporter does not make bags.
Type your product lines into "Your product lines" — one per row, the way a buyer writes them: cotton t-shirt, hoodie, polo shirt. Each line is an Alibaba RFQ search and the catalogue every request is scored against.
Describe your company in "About your company": what you make, certificates, MOQ, lead time, port and price term, export markets. The rules read your MOQ and markets from it; the AI scores against it and writes its quote replies only from these facts — a price, certificate or lead time you did not write here is never invented.
Press Start. The live search runs the Alibaba RFQ scraper on your Apify account (about $0.002 per request, capped at $0.50 by default), then the free filters drop closed, old, out-of-market and too-small requests before anything is charged.
Open the Shortlist view (docs/img/shortlist.svg): country, quantity, fit score, buyer temperature, the quote today flag and why each request fits. The Quote replies view (docs/img/quote-replies.svg) has the reply in the buyer's language — paste it into Alibaba's Quote-now form from your supplier account and add your price.

What a run costs

The default search reads 200 requests. At about one in three fitting, that is ≈ 67 qualified buying leads:

rules only: $0.40 source scan on your account + 67 × $0.004 = $0.67 ($0.010 a lead);
with the AI: $0.40 + 67 × $0.01 + 67 × ≈ $0.0004 tokens = $1.10 ($0.016 a lead) — translation, quoted specs and target price, HS heading suggestion and the reply draft included.

The first 25 buying leads on the Actor are free, filtered and duplicate requests are never charged by us, and the hit rate above is an estimate until the first measured live run replaces it.

Automate it

Buying requests fill their quote seats in days, so run it daily. After the first real run, open the saved task the status links, click Schedule and put your e-mail in notifyEmail: each morning only the new requests that fit arrive, remembered by RFQ id so nothing is delivered or charged twice. From code:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("rich_minds/alibaba-rfq-leads-ai").call(run_input={
    "products": ["cotton t-shirt", "hoodie"],
    "sellerProfile": "T-shirt and hoodie manufacturer, GOTS certified. MOQ 500 pieces. FOB Chennai.",
    "buyerCountries": ["US", "DE", "MX"],
    "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5,
})
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["subject"], item["score"], item["quoteReply"])

A daily monitor with ≈ 10 new fits a day costs about $3.00 a month on rules or $4.90 with the AI — a fraction of a buy-lead membership such as go4WorldBusiness Silver at $75 a month.

Alibaba RFQ Leads AI: Buying Requests Matched to Your Products on the Apify Store →