What Is 1688.com?

1688.com is a major business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce platform, giving online businesses around the world access to a huge marketplace of wholesale trading opportunities in a convenient, secure environment.

1688 is the flagship domestic wholesale business of Alibaba Group, and it's the leading e-commerce platform for small businesses in China conducting both domestic and international trade.

What 1688 Covers

The platform spans more than 16 major industry categories — raw materials, industrial products, clothing and apparel, household goods, small commodities, and more — offering a full chain of supply services from raw material procurement through production and processing to spot wholesale. This breadth lets buyers select from a huge pool of hot new products and high-quality merchants for wholesale purchasing.

How 1688 Differs from AliExpress

• Language — Most dropshippers who don't speak Chinese rely almost exclusively on AliExpress, since 1688 (like Taobao) operates primarily in Chinese. This language barrier is one of the biggest practical differences between the two platforms.
• Business model — Visually and functionally, 1688's design, features, and overall experience closely resemble Alibaba and AliExpress. But where AliExpress is built for small-quantity retail and cross-border buyers, 1688 is built around domestic Chinese wholesale — meaning lower per-unit prices, since sellers aren't pricing in the extra cost of cross-border logistics and communication.

Why It Matters for Dropshippers

Because 1688 is priced for domestic wholesale rather than international retail, it consistently offers lower factory-direct prices than AliExpress or Alibaba.com for the same or similar products — but working across the language and logistics gap usually means using either a translation tool, a dropshipping agent, or a plugin built specifically to bridge cross-border payment and shipping for 1688 purchases. That's the gap that services like ZQ Dropshipping are built to close, letting international sellers tap into 1688's pricing without needing to navigate the platform in Chinese themselves.