On November 14 I searched 40 everyday products on Alibaba.com and on Made-in-China.com and kept the top 100 offers for each product from each site. The median minimum order on Alibaba was 10 units. On Made-in-China.com it was 100. Alibaba had the lower median on 36 of the 39 products that both sites carried, the same median on 3, and the higher one on none.
If you are buying your first 100 of something, that gap decides who you can buy from. 86% of the Alibaba offers will take an order of 100, and 54% of the Made-in-China ones will.
The minimum order sits on every search result, next to the price range. It just isn't something you can see a pattern in by scrolling, because one product is three or four pages on each site and the units keep changing.
I collected the offers with China Supplier Price Comparator, an Apify Actor I wrote. The run made 280 requests and took 112 seconds. It returned 7,900 offers, and no request failed or was blocked. For the comparisons below I used the 7,499 offers that show a price and have every word of the keyword in the title.
If you source products for a small shop, or you want to price a first order before you email a supplier, put your own keywords in the input and you get the same tables.
The input
{ "queries": ["yoga mat", "bluetooth speaker", "stainless steel water bottle", "led strip light", "phone case", "usb c cable", "backpack", "ceramic mug", "socks", "glass jar"], "maxItems": 8000, "quantity": 100 } That is ten of the 40 keywords. The full list is in input.json with the sample data. maxItems is split evenly, so 8,000 across 40 keywords and two sites is 100 offers per keyword per site, taken from the top of each site's own result list.
quantity is how many units you want. The Actor uses it to mark each offer with meetsMoq and to work out the cheapest order you could place with that supplier. You can also pass a duty rate and a freight cost per unit and get a landed cost on every offer. I left both at zero here.
Pricing is $0.005 to start a run plus $0.0015 per offer, so this run is 7,900 × $0.0015 + $0.005 = $11.855 at the Store price. One keyword with 80 offers is $0.125.
Minimum orders
| Marketplace | Offers compared | Median minimum order | 10 or fewer | 100 or fewer | 500 or more | 1,000 or more |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alibaba.com | 3,601 | 10 | 57.8% | 86.4% | 9.9% | 5.5% |
| Made-in-China.com | 3,898 | 100 | 20.9% | 53.9% | 34.6% | 19.8% |
One in five Alibaba offers has a minimum of a single unit. One in five Made-in-China offers wants 1,000 or more.
By product
| Product | Alibaba median minimum | Made-in-China median minimum | Alibaba offers you can order at 100 | Made-in-China offers you can order at 100 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| yoga mat | 2 | 100 | 98.0% | 58.2% |
| bluetooth speaker | 5 | 50 | 81.4% | 77.8% |
| stainless steel water bottle | 2 | 500 | 89.3% | 21.2% |
| led strip light | 10 | 50 | 95.0% | 75.8% |
| silicone baking mat | 100 | 100 | 71.0% | 65.9% |
| phone case | 10 | 50 | 97.9% | 81.8% |
| usb c cable | 20 | 220 | 85.9% | 48.0% |
| backpack | 2 | 300 | 99.0% | 38.0% |
| dog leash | 10 | 200 | 92.9% | 46.0% |
| ceramic mug | 36 | 1,000 | 92.1% | 26.5% |
| sunglasses | 5 | 100 | 95.0% | 61.0% |
| power bank | 7.5 | 100 | 89.8% | 85.0% |
| wireless earbuds | 2 | 5 | 100.0% | 86.0% |
| garden hose | 10 | 500 | 81.2% | 40.0% |
| bamboo cutting board | 10 | 500 | 90.4% | 16.5% |
| makeup brush set | 10 | 400 | 87.0% | 42.2% |
| resistance bands | 2 | 300 | 94.9% | 41.8% |
| camping tent | 1.5 | 20 | 89.4% | 78.1% |
| desk lamp | 2 | 27 | 98.8% | 81.0% |
| kitchen scale | 36 | 500 | 71.0% | 32.6% |
| tote bag | 50 | 300 | 91.8% | 30.6% |
| baseball cap | 50 | 50 | 95.0% | 77.0% |
| laptop stand | 5 | 100 | 80.4% | 50.5% |
| pet bed | 5 | 100 | 91.4% | 56.0% |
| hair dryer | 50 | 200 | 56.0% | 46.0% |
| electric kettle | 12 | 1,000 | 70.0% | 21.3% |
| notebook | 100 | 300 | 82.0% | 44.0% |
| umbrella | 50 | 100 | 70.0% | 56.0% |
| socks | 50 | 300 | 90.0% | 35.1% |
| christmas lights | 6.5 | 25 | 83.0% | 75.0% |
| air fryer | 6 | 500 | 57.6% | 12.0% |
| massage gun | 2 | 50 | 87.8% | 75.5% |
| car phone holder | 5 | 100 | 100.0% | 68.2% |
| glass jar | 100 | 5,000 | 52.6% | 15.0% |
| jump rope | 10 | 300 | 86.5% | 38.8% |
| solar garden light | 10 | 10 | 87.0% | 92.9% |
| office chair | 2 | 20 | 99.0% | 92.0% |
| wall clock | 2 | 110 | 97.0% | 50.0% |
| fishing rod | 2 | 100 | 95.7% | 59.6% |
The gap is widest on cheap things made in bulk. The median Made-in-China listing for glass jars wants 5,000 and the median Alibaba one wants 100. Ceramic mugs are 1,000 against 36 and electric kettles 1,000 against 12. At 100 units, 12% of the Made-in-China air fryer offers are open to you.
The three ties are silicone baking mats, baseball caps and solar garden lights. The fortieth keyword, "baby stroller", is missing because Alibaba has no catalogue page under that name.
The same supplier on both sites
Some of that gap could just be different suppliers, so I looked for the ones that are on both. The sample has 3,051 suppliers on Alibaba and 1,203 on Made-in-China.com, and only 91 company names appear on both. For 86 of them I have the same keyword on both sites, which makes 89 pairs.
| Lower on Alibaba | Same | Lower on Made-in-China | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum order | 41 | 24 | 24 |
| Price | 43 | 3 | 43 |
For the same supplier and the same keyword, the median minimum is 30 on Alibaba and 100 on Made-in-China.com. One sock maker asks for 50 on Alibaba and 500 on Made-in-China.com. One mug maker asks for 1,000 on both.
So part of the gap is the same factory quoting a smaller minimum on Alibaba. More of it is that the two sites mostly show you different suppliers.
Price is an even split, 43 pairs each way. For the same supplier I can't call either site cheaper.
Prices are harder to compare
By median price, Alibaba comes out lower on 26 of the 39 products and Made-in-China.com on 13. I wouldn't read much into that, because a keyword search returns a different mix of things on each site.
The clearest case is "stainless steel water bottle". The Alibaba median is $34.99 and the Made-in-China one is $2.70. Alibaba's result list for that keyword is full of hydrogen-water bottles, water coolers and bottle-filling stations, and every word of the keyword is in their titles. Only 19 of its 75 offers are under $10. Garden hose goes the other way for a different reason: 65 of the 100 Made-in-China listings price it by the meter.
Most offers also show a range instead of one price: 69% on Alibaba and 86% on Made-in-China.com. Where there is a range, the top is about 1.3 times the bottom at the median. The listing doesn't say which quantity gets which end, so I compared the low ends and kept both in the data.
The cheapest offer is rarely the one you can order
On Made-in-China.com, the lowest-priced offer needs an order above 100 units for 26 of the 40 keywords. On Alibaba that is true for 7 of 39.
The very cheapest listings need reading before you get excited about them. There is a wall clock at $0.01, with a minimum order of 10,000. The two cheapest "wireless earbuds", at a cent and a half each, are a silicone neckband holder and a set of ear tips, each with a minimum of 2,000. Two Alibaba tote bags are listed at $0.01 with a minimum of 1 or 2, which I read as a placeholder price and not an offer.
That is why the Actor's free COMPARISON record reports cheapestMeetingMoq next to cheapest for every keyword. The second number is the one I'd take to a supplier.
Badges don't narrow anything
Every one of the 4,000 Made-in-China offers carries a Diamond Member or Gold Member badge (75.1% and 24.9%), and 94.2% say Audited Supplier. On Alibaba, 81.9% of the 3,900 offers are from a Gold Supplier.
Supplier age is more useful. Alibaba shows years on the platform: the median is 6, and 22.7% of the offers come from suppliers with two years or less.
Two more counts from the Made-in-China side. 256 of its 4,000 offers (6.4%) are paid placements. And 63% of its offers come from two provinces, Guangdong (36.0%) and Zhejiang (27.0%).
Three sites that aren't in here
I wanted 1688, AliExpress and Yiwugo in this comparison too. In testing, 1688 answered the first automated request with a challenge page, and AliExpress and Yiwugo did the same after a handful of searches. The Actor does not log in and does not work around challenges, so those three are out.
The same rule applies during a run. If a marketplace serves a challenge page, the Actor stops reading that marketplace, retries nothing and says so in the SUMMARY record.
Calling it from an agent
{"queries": ["yoga mat"], "maxItems": 10} returns the top five offers from each site for $0.02. An agent should read the COMPARISON record first. It has the cheapest offer, the cheapest one that meets your quantity and each site's median price and median minimum order, so there is usually no need to rank the offers.
The Actor needs no login and runs with limited permissions, so it works through Apify's MCP server at https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=mdcurt/china-supplier-price-comparator.
To watch prices over time, schedule it with the same keywords and compare runs with Dataset Diff Monitor, another Actor of mine, keyed on id and watching price and moq.
Fine print
- I picked the 40 keywords by hand. They are everyday consumer products and not a sample of either catalogue.
- Each site contributes the top 100 offers of its own default result list per keyword. Alibaba.com is read through its China catalogue pages, so its offers are from suppliers in China.
- 7,499 of the 7,900 offers are compared. The rest either show no price (28 offers, all on Made-in-China.com) or don't have every word of the keyword in the title.
- Minimum orders are counted in the supplier's own unit. About 13% of the offers on each site use sets, meters or pairs instead of pieces.
- These are list prices from search result pages, before any negotiation. Quantity price breaks and lead times are on the product pages, which the Actor doesn't open.
- Suppliers are matched across the two sites by company name, after lower-casing and removing punctuation.
- It was one run on November 14, 2026, against public pages without a login: 280 requests, none failed, none blocked.
- The offers, the input and the script that builds every table are in the Actor's source under
examples/minimum-order-comparison/.
If you run this on your own products and the two sites disagree in a way I haven't covered, leave a comment. I'd like to see it.
