Taobao Connector

Reads Taobao inside the operator's own Chrome over CDP. The search page is a client-side React app whose data layer is the signed mtop API — every XHR wants a sign computed from the _m_h5_tk cookie, and unsigned probes answer FAIL_SYS_TOKEN_EMPTY. There is no anonymous tier; the site's own JS signs requests natively in a real browser.

When to use

• Search Taobao by Chinese or English text
• One item's price, shop, sales label, description images

Tools available

• taobao_search(query, page) — listings. Prices are in YUAN (CNY), never converted: price_cny is None when hidden — never 0.
• taobao_card(item_id_or_url) — one item card. item ids are 9-13 digit strings; pass a bare id or an item.taobao.com URL.

Not an MCP tool: taobao_selfcheck() is a tri-state canary that renders one live search page. It is CLI-only — marketplace-mcp doctor runs every connector's canary at once.

Gotchas

• Prices stay in yuan. Comparing against ruble sources needs an explicit rate; a baked-in one would go silently stale.
• A detected login/CAPTCHA wall returns challenge_required and requires_user_action=true. Complete it in the scraping profile before retrying the same operation. Failed payloads are not cached; a retry reads the browser again. Successful results still use the normal TTL cache.
• With CHROME_CHALLENGE_HANDOFF_S enabled, handoff_expires_at confirms that the challenged search/card tab is retained. Complete its interaction, then repeat the same tool arguments in the same MCP session before expiry. No new navigation is issued for that resume; expiry never extends on retries.
• The operator's Chrome must be running with CDP (uvx ru-marketplace-mcp browser start or scripts/start_chrome_cdp.sh; use uvx ru-marketplace-mcp unblock taobao to log in).

DSH activation

In DeepSeek Harness, the default profile exposes only compare_prices and compare_sources through the cheap compare mount. Per-marketplace tools and marketplace_sources require RU_MARKETPLACE_MCP_FULL=1 and a profile restart; do not call them in the default mode.