What's your workflow for finding the 1688 / Alibaba source of a product?

I keep seeing the same question from dropshippers and private-label sellers: you've found a product on AliExpress or Amazon, and you want to know what the factory charges for it on 1688 or Alibaba before you contact anyone.

The options I know of:

- 1688's and Alibaba's own photo search (the camera icon). Free and fast for one product at a time, but the 1688 side is all in Chinese, and you can't export or compare results.

- Browser extensions that run a reverse image search from a product page. Handy while browsing, but still one product at a time.

- Sourcing agents. They do the matching and the negotiating, for a fee or a margin. Worth it once you're ordering at volume.

- Scraping the image search. You get the matches as a table (price in CNY, orders, repurchase rate, supplier, similarity) for many products at once. Disclosure: I built a few Apify Actors for this, including a 1688 image search scraper, and an open-source agent skill that chains them into a retail-vs-factory price table: https://github.com/piotrv1001/apify-skills

One thing I learned the hard way: photo matching works well for generic goods (kitchen tools, shelving, filament), but for branded electronics it mostly returns look-alikes, so you still have to check the photos.

What does your process look like? Do you go straight to an agent, or shortlist suppliers yourself first?