My experience selling on Mercari after over 1K sales

When Ebay banned me over a year ago, I had to switch to Mercari to do some online sales. Here are some observations after a year and over 1000 successful sales.

Pros

• The buyer only has 3 days to dispute the item; after that, they are SOL. I once accidentally shipped a buyer a PS5 controller when he bought a headset. After day 3, Mercari marks the transaction as closed. He had messaged me afterwards saying he was out of town and didn’t get to check until later, but there was nothing we could do with the transaction at that point.
• I like that each buyer is forced to leave feedback. This means your feedback score is a lot higher than Ebay where it’s optional to leave feedback. Of course you could get a lot more 3 or 4 star instead of 5 stars, but there’s not that many ppl over 1K feedback on Mercari, so if you have a score that high, you are “trusted.”
• There seems to be fewer scammers on Mercari. I wasn’t selling super expensive items on Mercari so maybe that plays into it. I think the most expensive item I sold was a desktop PC for about $800 or so. I only had 1 attempted scammer who bought an Apple Watch band and said it was used but in fact it was brand new. She never returned the item and so Mercari eventually closed her case.
• It seems Mercari will eat cheap items. I was selling some used PS4 games that I had bought a long time ago from Gamestop. I remember selling them on Ebay and about 10% of them the disk wouldn’t work and so I had to send a replacement. On Mercari, when someone rates you, you have to rate them back to get paid. However, for some of these transactions, I just got a “Mercari completed your transaction.” My guess is the buyer complained the item didn’t work and Mercari just ate it instead of going through the return process.
• There’s no signature required for $750+ items. When I was selling the $800 PC, I had asked them if I needed signature and I scoured their site, but there was no mention of needing signature for a $800 item (this assumes you’re using your own label, not theirs.)
• Return labels. I’ve had a couple of returns where once again, I stupidly shipped out the wrong item. I’m still unsure if Mercari charges me for the return label or not. I know I don’t get paid for the item but I can’t recall if I got charged the return label.
• You can cancel transactions w/o negative feedback. If you accidentally oversell something and if you have a lot of completed transactions, it doesn’t seem to impact you if you cancel items here and there. I had some folks in Hawaii trying to buy expensive to ship items that I had to cancel. They do say if you cancel a lot, you’ll get a badget that says something like “High Cancel Rate” or something but I never got it. Whereas on Ebay, if you cancel too many items where you say it’s your mistake, it impacts you negatively.
• I tend to use my own shipping labels for Mercari. For instance, Mercari would charge $3.65 for a 4oz first class item. The most Pirateship would charge me would be $3.49, so it saves me a bit of money.
• It seems buyers would like the shipping charge broken out. You can get a nice ship icon next to your listing when you do FREE SHIPPING, but kind of like the psychological $9.99 is better than $10, it seems buyers would prefer a lower item price and then you tact on shipping during checkout. This is all anecdotal; I haven’t dug deeper whether this is true or not.
• I do like the item promotions. Let’s say you have a $20 item and it hasn’t sold in a week. You can then “promote” it and drop the price by 10%. This bumps up the listing in search rankings. Mercari limits you to 10 per day. Unfortunately, you can’t promote items under $10.

Cons

• You can’t list multiple items. Let’s say you have 5 of the same item. Unfortuantely there’s no ‘quantity’ option. Once one sells, you have to relist it.
• You can’t relist on mobile. Only on the desktop PC. You can relist a COMPLETED transaction in the app, but not pending trasactions.
• Ebay still tends to do better price wise on certain items. It seems electronics do better on Ebay. I think Mercari started out geared towards clothes and so I think women’s clothes are about equal to Ebay. Seems video games are about even. Men’s shoes are better on Ebay. You just have to play around with it. Prices may be cheaper also due to the 3 day complaint period whereas on Ebay you have up to 30 days (and hell, even 6 months if there was a cc chargeback.) I haven’t had a Mercari cc chargeback yet so not sure how that plays out.
• There is no top seller lower fees or anything. You’re charged 10% + (3%+$.50) as your fees. You can’t do better than that unfortunately. The 3%+$.50 sucks for lower priced items (say $5 items.)
• There’s no ‘vacation’ setting. Luckily the app allows you to edit all listings and ‘deactivate’ all of them.
• You can’t turn off offers in Mercari. I used to never do offers on Ebay just because I hate low ball offers. Unfortunately, you can’t turn off that feature in Mercari, so you’ll get low ball offfers all the time.

Conclusion

The way I’ve done it is I’ve double listed on both Mercari and Ebay (especially if I have multiple quantities.) I tend to price Ebay 10%-20% higher to account for that return window. It does take twice the amount of time to double list things but at least it’s easy to “relist” once things start moving. If an item is geared towards men (say men’s shoes,) Ebay is by far your best bet.) If it’s video games or an Ariana Grande signed CD, Mercari will net you about the same price.