You have a money-making idea and a few reputable suppliers in place, you are wondering what platform is be best for you? Chances are you have heard of eBay, Poshmark. But there is a recent contender from a Japanese startup that people keep mentioning, Mercari.
Read until the end and you will get my authentic Mercari reviews for sellers: 4 Pros and Cons. As a budding entrepreneur, I hope to share with you my first-hand experience using this platform. Where they excel, and where they fall short. After going through all the pros and cons, you can quickly assess whether Mercari is the right marketplace to jumpstart your online store.
Mercari reviews for sellers
My experience with Mercari wasn’t too long but it was long enough to give me a clear view of how it operates. I was selling on Mercari for almost a year in 2019. Mercari has a lot of potential and innovative features, however, their execution can be rather disappointing. If you wish to start a selling account with them, please understand all of the good and bad that comes with this marketplace app. If the benefits outweigh the risks, maybe you can start signing up and test out some items that tend to do well on this site.
Pros of selling on Mercari
Since I started learning how to sell on Mercari, I’ve noticed some benefits. Here are some reasons why I like using Mercari for selling my clothes.
While reading Mercari reviews selling and actually participating in the platform, I’ve come to realize the many benefits it provides. Here are some top reasons why people gravitate to this site to sell clothes, accessories, cookware, sporting goods.
Reasonable Fees
Mercari has one of the lowest and most attractive fee structures amongst all of the Marketplace apps. This increases your profitability and helps you come up with simple pricing schemes.
The low 10% and the flexible cost-saving shipping options allow many people to start selling items at lower prices through Mercari. If you try to sell anything under $15 on a platform like Poshmark, you will hardly make sales due to their expensive and inflexible shipping options. After all, not a lot of people are willing to pay a 7$ shipping fee for 10$ items. The low fee for Mercari also means that you get a bigger cut for items set at the same price sold on Mercari.
A wide selection of goods
When people think about Mercari, most people would think of buying or selling clothes. However, this is quite far from the truth as there are many other notable categories of products available. Even if your main type of goods is clothes, you can expand into all kinds of other territories like tech products, yoga mats, bath bombs, etc. Your unused items like some gifts or home tools can also be a good choice for a site of this type.
Fast and Fuss-free Listings Management
Now if you are somebody with many other listings on other sites. You may find Mercari to be a great relief since it’s incredibly easy to post listings up on here. After all, we don’t want any form of complications after having two or more sites to juggle with.
With your Mercari listing in place, there is little else you have to tend to except for responding to your customer’s inquiries. You can save time on these tasks immensely by having a thorough and detailed product description. Another important part of your listing that would help you shine and save on time is high-quality pictures. If the two conditions above are met, your buyer won’t have to ask too many questions and your maintaining effort on the listing can be minimal. As they don’t require so much effort, this platform is perfect for people who are short on time or are busy with other commitments.
Many different shipping options to suit your logistics needs
You can come up with your own shipping cost and this is one of the great ways to help your conversion rate. You can take care of your own shipping ( at a cheaper price through some tools ) or you can use the pre-configured UPS/USPS label. Due to the various shipping modals you can use, as well as how you set price and shipping fee, you can figure out the sweet pricing scheme where you achieve profitability.
Cons of selling on Mercari
While Mercari reviews on selling might look rather attractive at first glance with their simple interface and low fee, there are many reasons why they are not market leaders in the marketplace space for flipsellers. Here are the three most important negative issues that I picked up during my time listing goods and items on Mercari.
Seller Dashboard
Mercari’s seller dashboard has many issues and this is sadly one of the main pitfalls I encounter when I’m trying to sell my goods here. With the current state of affairs, their seller’s dashboard makes it hard for me to recommend it unless a drastic change comes about.
So many important policy announcements got mixed up and drowned out by some trivial alerts. They also make it impossible to see all the active offers and I cannot manage all of my offers in just one screen. Talking about shooting-yourself-in-the-foot UI!
Smaller sales volumes
While it’s clearly unintuitive to try selling your goods through Mercari, slow sales are the deal-breaker for many people who are trying to make some quick bucks on this platform.
Compared to other sites, this site always gives me lower revenue when I cross-post my goods to other sites. With 100 items listed, I can manage to sell 2-4 products a month. This same number of products yields three to four times the number of orders on Poshmark or eBay. While it is unclear why this seems to be the case, I speculate that people don’t shop as much on Mercari. If you are new to selling clothes or self-care items online, and you need to focus on just one site while taking care of other aspects of business, maybe Mercari should not be your top choice.
Slow pay and fraudulent buyers
Like many other sites, Mercari has their check and balances to build a healthy community of users. Its rating system is a mechanism that is used to weed out bad players who don’t follow the rules. But this system is also the source of so much frustration and hatred toward the site. Coupled with the notoriously terrible customer service, it is not hard to see why people are not very willing to pay up or they just leave Mercari for good. So what are the real issues behind the transaction process of Mercari? The two main issues that most sellers report are slow pay and fraudulent buyers.
As when the customer receives your goods, they have a window of 3 days to make a rating on you. Only then can you rate your customer, and finally the money deposited will get green-lighted. So if your customer fails to rate you at all, you will have to wait 3 whole days until the sum gets processed. This can of course affect your cash flow and slow down your business activity. Another issue that comes when a platform like this lacks good customer service is that you are left on your own devices dealing with fraudulent buyers. Whenever there are disputes, Mercari tends to choose to ignore and not try to resolve the matter.
I was selling a pair of Bluetooth headphones in brand new condition for a significant amount of money. This particular individual rated me with great feedback as soon as they received the products. They waited for 10 days before requesting a return stating that the product is not as originally described. Mercari immediately approves the return process. I wasted my time and effort while trying to fulfill the orders and also pay for shipping costs. Even though this whole chain of events is totally against Mercari’s own policy, the customer service remains silent and unhelpful.
This is the main reason why I completely stopped doing business with them. If you aren’t yet convinced you can check out the reviews on Sitejabber to see hundreds of other reviews for selling on Mercari of the same vein.
Is Mercari good for sellers? – My recommendation
So what is my recommendation on Mercari? Is it a worthwhile platform for you to grow your business?
I find that Mercari can be a perfect solution for anyone who might be looking for a low fee solution with very little effort spent on listing maintenance.
However, if you want to buy and resell items at a fast pace with many orders per month then Mercari might not be my #1 recommendation. Mercari items move slowly (or at all!) and you would have to be very patient if you decide to stick with it.
If you specialize in higher-value items, I suggest you take a look elsewhere as Mercari simply doesn’t have the cred for handling disputes. More common e-commerce platforms like Amazon and eBay might be a better venue in the long run as they give you more tools, protection, and community.
