Selling on Mercari Guide for Beginners | 2022 Tips
Alright, so you want to sell on Mercari, but you’re not exactly sure how to go about it, what the best practices are or how to get really good sales. I’m going to answer those questions for you in this article.
I made about twenty-two hundred dollars over the last selling on year selling on Mercari, very very spare time. Honestly this was easy and took a very little effort.
So the first thing I want to talk to you about are kind of the pros and cons of selling on Mercari. This help you quickly see whether Mercari might work for you or not.
The Pros are that it’s really easy to list your items for sale on Mercari. Honestly, it takes me, maybe a minute to list an item on Mercari once I have pictures already taken. The next Pro is that the fees are pretty low. It’s 10% across the board no matter what you sell. Imagine, sell it for at 10% and that’s how much from our Mercari is keeping and that is pretty low compared to other websites and apps.
SHIPPING In my opinion, shipping is super easy on Mercari, you still have plenty of options. You can do your own shipping; you can do shipping through Mercari. You can pay for shipping and have the supplier get free shipping which is usually kind of something that boosts your sales or you can have the payer pay for shipping.
So there are a lot of options but they’re so easy to kind of navigate. Another thing is you can pretty much do everything from your phone. You can list items on your phone; you can, if you can print from your phone, you can probably do a hundred percent of your Mercari business or your Mercari selling on your phone so that is a huge advantage.
Poshmark is similar, you can do almost everything from your phone but I save this as an advantage because websites like eBay are still pretty clunky and old-school and you can’t do everything from your phone. It’s harder but eBay is full of buyers. I hate to complain about eBay because I make alot of money on that platform, but they need to up their game.
After all, these other apps have been coming out that are really easy to work with. Some cons for Mercari are basically, if you’re a reseller like me, full-time reseller, I have 700 items, no, close to 800 items in my inventory and I don’t list them all on Mercari, not even close because it’s hard to kind of organize and manage that many items on Mercari so it’s not great for full-time selling, you probably could do it but it’s just a lot harder to keep things organized.
One thing that people have told me is that they have trouble selling things for higher prices on their Mercari because everybody on Mercari is looking for a good deal and while I do agree everybody is looking for a good deal on Mercari, it’s kind of a place for deal shoppers to shop. I don’t have a problem of getting the prices for the items on Merccari, All re-sellers understand how important it is to buy items that you are sure you can make a profit on.
I generally sell things for around $20 and up and that’s not too bad if you’re looking for immediate payment on Mercari, you’re not gonna get it, so another con is that you have to wait for payment you have to wait for the item to be delivered to your buyer and then you have to wait for them to either leave a rating or for three days to pass after it’s been delivered and Mercari will automatically give you a rating.
So you do have to wait to get your your money, it usually takes from the time you sell the item to the time you get access to the funds, it’s usually gonna be about a week and another huge con for me is that there’s no bundling feature>
With eBay and on Poshmark which are my two other main platforms. You can easily buy several items from one seller and on Mercari, you can’t. Really the only way to do that are either for the buyer to buy everything individually or to contact you and you have to create a special listing for them to bundle all those items together.
So hopefully, Mercari kind of fixes that soon and create some sort of bundling feature. Alright, so the Mercari rating system is pretty easy and I love it because you basically add a rating for every single transaction you do unlike on eBay where if a buyer didn’t leave you a feedback, then you just don’t get feedback for the transaction.
So the way the Mercari rating system works is that there are, you can do, it’s a five-star rating system and they leave you feedback within those three days after delivery or Mercari just goes ahead and leaves you a five-star feedback if they’d never do it so or a five-star rating that’s what they call them on Mercari so it’s a pretty good system because you automatically have 5 stars if they don’t leave a rating and it really helps your potential buyer see that you’ve done a lot of transactions.
Mercari also has these things called badges and there are four different badges. One of them says how long you’ve been on record, so it says number since I think – 2016. The other one is fast shipper, no, quick shipper and that means you usually ship within 24 hours which is a great badge to have because people wants my stuff fast.
The other one says if you’re reliable which means items are delivered as described and also you’re not cancelling items. The last one is fast responder which basically means that you’re responding to messages with an average of 12 hours so you want to get as many of those badges as possible those shows and those show in your profile and that will kind of give your buyer confidence to talk with you.
So like I kind of touched on before, getting paid on Mercari does take a little bit of time basically a buyer will buy an item, you will ship it once that item is delivered, the buyer has three days to leave you a rating. Once they leave your rating, your rating, your funds get released into your Mercari, I guess kind of like your Mercari bank account where you can request a direct deposit. After that, if they don’t leave a rating within three days then Mercari automatically will give you your rating and also release your funds so it can take some time to access that money.
If you want money right now, then Mercari might not be the best place for you. So shipping in Mercari is great, you do have a lot of options but there are also really simple options if you want them to be you either pay for shipping yourself or you can have the buyer pay for shipping.
If you pay for shipping yourself you have two options, you can either do a Mercari label or you can say I’m going to basically do everything on my own and all I do is provide you with the address of the customer. I personally just use the Mercari labels because it makes it so much easier to streamline and get things done quickly.
That’s important in my business. Basically, just pick away class based on how much your item weighs and then you pick if you want UPS, FedEx or UPS pack and ship and then a label will print out when that item sells or it won’t print out but it’ll provide you with a label to print out one side of themselves.
Supplies you need to sell on Mercari
Alright, so what do you need to sell on Mercari? I highly recommend a postage scale, it helps you weight things so you know which posted or which shipping option to select they are under $20. The one I use I think is 16 or 17 dollars, I’ve had it since 2016 so I’ve had I think 2016 or 2017 for
I’ve had it for two or three years and the thing that I love about it is that it operates on batteries or by plugging it in. So I usually have it plugged in but if I need to move it somewhere like away from a wall I can weigh a large box or something, I can just unplug it and it’ll start working off the battery so I really love that. I’m not constantly having to change batteries because there’s the option of plugging it in but also I have the option of using batteries if I need to for some reason unplug it so I will put the link down below all the products that I use that I’m going to mention so the postage scale is number one
Number Two is a printer because I print all my labels. We use a dymo label printer but you can also just use a regular inkjet printer. My dymo label printer has been awesome and if you plan on being a serious re-seller, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It is the very best investment I have made.
Number Three You also need something to mail your items and if you’re going to be mailing Priority Mail items through USPS, you can get free shipping supplies. My favorite boxes, I will link down below is a shoe box and then a kind of a regular square box and then also Polymailers, I’m going to link down below the new polymailers.
I’m going to start using. I’m trying to be a little bit better with the environment and not use as much plastic. These Polymailers, the reason polymailers are great is because they’re really lightweight and they’re kind of durable they’re not gonna like rip if a box corner like jabs into the side of it but these ones are recycled and recyclable so that makes me feel little bit better about it.
So there’s just my little encouragement for you guys to try and be a little better with the environment and make choices that are gonna be a little bit less wasteful. So that’s my next step in trying to be a little bit less wasteful. I’m continually trying to be friendly towards the environment and use less plastic, less waste so I’m gonna tangent sorry but polymailers or boxes, I will link all the ones that I use down below.
Alright, what can you sell on Mercari? You can sell pretty much anything on Mercari. There are some obvious things that you can’t sell on Mercari like drugs or weapons. You also can’t sell stuff like mystery boxes on Mercari. You need, the buyer needs to know exactly what they’re purchasing when they buy something so you can’t say because I know a lot of us resellers occasionally will do a mystery box or a reseller box where you don’t know the exact content.
You cannot sell those on Mercari. You have to tell the buyer exactly what is in each listing that you’re listing, right, So how to sell items on Mercari? There are two key ways to get sales on Mercari and that is photos and searchable titles and descriptions, so photos. Make sure you take really good pictures. Pictures are like the main thing on Mercari. If you scroll through the app, you will see that every item is basically a picture, a price and then if there’s free shipping the titles aren’t showing nothing else shows except for those three things.
So make sure your pictures are clear, clean, and crisp. It’s really important you don’t have to have professional pictures but have clear pictures. So my tips for that are having clear background whether you use the hardwood floor in your house or if you use you can use like a white poster board or what I do personally for clothing is I just have a command hook on a white painted wall and I just hang my items on there and it makes it really quick and it makes the background really crisp and clean, that’s why I take my photos.
Another thing is make sure you use all the photos that you can. Mercari gives you eight spaces for photos so make sure you use all of them if you can, some ideas are front back every single tag like brand tag, size tag, fabric content tag, care tag. I like to show all of the different tags so that the buyer knows exactly what they’re getting and also they’re not going to message me and ask me what is the fabric content of this, I don’t and if they do I can just look at the pictures and I don’t have to go and find the item to answer that question.
I can just quickly go to the pictures and let them know so it’s really important to show all the pictures that you can, not just because it makes it easier for you, also because the buyer wants to see the item and it the more pictures you show the more clear the condition and the type of item it is for the buyers so use as many pictures as you can.
The other thing I want to mention is titles, keywords, descriptions. Make sure you use really good keywords. So in your title, make sure you think about how the buyer is going to be searching for that item. I’d like to mention brand, style, type, is it a dress, is that a shirt, is it shoes, loafers, boots, winter all those kinds of keywords use those in the title. Try to use all words that potential customers will be searching for.
Use those in the description. It’s really important because a lot of people aren’t going to go through the categories. They’re going to just search there in a search of boots size 5 or whatever or 3 people, dress blue so make sure you use keywords like that so that people can find your item
Now, I just want to give you some tips for Mercari. Make sure you fill out your profile, add a picture of yourself. If you don’t want to show your face, you don’t maybe wear some sunglasses or a hat or something. If you’re kind of scared of putting your face out there on the internet but people want to see who they’re purchasing from, they want to put a face to a name.
Make sure you fill out your bio. I’ll show you an example of what my bio looks like right here, so basically just fill it out as best as you can tell people a little bit about yourself, a little bit about what you’re selling, where you get stuff like that. So that kind of gives people the confidence to shop with you, also keep in mind your ratings and your badges also showing your profile so the more badges you can get, the better because that gives you a buyer confidence just to shop with you.
One thing to note is when to upload. Try to upload when you think that people are shopping too, probably not a lot of people shopping. Most people aren’t shopping in the middle of the day during the week either because a lot of people work that normal 9:00 to 5:00 so I really try to list more at night usually between 7 and 11 p.m. I try to closer to 7 but a lot of times I don’t get to working until 10:00 or 11:00 after I put the kids to bed and I kind of clean up the house so do what you can to list at appropriate times. I mean this isn’t super important people are still going to find your items.
If your item is popping up as a new item, there’s going to be more chances to get in front of the people that are gonna be buying your item. Keep in mind to price competitively. I do boost my prices a little bit because I know people like to make offers but don’t go crazy with your prices.
Sometimes I just see your astronomical price and I just don’t even consider that item. So I like to price on the high end of competitive I think that works for me, so that way it leaves a little bit of room for offers so that my buyers feel like they’re gonna get a good deal. I’m getting a decent price for what I want and I’m also providing them with a good deal. Also consider offers, you’re gonna get tons of offers. You don’t have to take them, I like to always counter I don’t decline offers.
I always counter offers even if I’m only countering like a dollar below my listing price that way my buyer knows that I’m interested in selling this item. I’m not just shutting the door in their face by declining the offer so consider offers. You’re going to get them, don’t get offended if you get them. Tt’s gonna happen, that’s just how their card works.
Also utilize that promote button. I love the promote button. I will sometimes just sit on the couch watching TV at night and promote my items so when you click that promote button you will get two options either a public sale which means that you basically are lowering the price that item and it shows listing that you’ve recently lowered it or a private sale which basically offers a price a lower price to the people that have liked her item and I usually do private sales by get a lot of sales that way.
I’m basically just offering the people that have liked the item as a little deal on that item and I get I do a lot of sales that way. So I really recommend the promote button and this especially works well if like I said, you paid your item, surprise a tiny bit so that you have room for those offers and then my last tip which is my bonus tip which is something that I like to do. Like I said at night, when I’m kind of have a little bit of free time or I’m watching TV and there’s an ad up but in between my shows I’d like to kind of see what’s selling on my card.
If you scroll through Mercari you will usually find a section that so that says sold in the last 10 minutes and then you can click think see all and you can see all the items that have been selling in the last 10 minutes or so that means those items are selling. Now, those are hot items.
Those are items that people want and this is a great way to educate yourself and know what’s selling and kind of keep in the back of your head what to look for to sell in the future so that’s just a little tip from me on kind of helping you expand your knowledge and know what to source to sell on requiring. Alright, so that’s everything I know about selling under Mercari.
Like I said, I’ve made about $2,000 on Mercari. A little bit more $2,200 in the last year or so I don’t list everything on my card. I think I have maybe 50 items listed on her card at any given time. I don’t know, I just I don’t list a lot on her card because I find sales aren’t super-fast and compares in the eBay.
EBay, like I said, is our main source of income and stuff and it’s just, we just find that it’s worth it for us. Just list everything on eBay and like I said before listing a high volume of items on Mercari is just kind of hard to organize but I do make $2,000 and extra 2200 hours over a year is pretty good considering I said maybe an hour or two some weeks on Mercari so it really just depends. Sometimes, I’ll go a couple months that will say anything, sometimes they’ll spend an hour or two a week but an extra $20 to $200 bucks.
If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. I would love for you to share this video with a friend who might want to make a little bit of extra money on Mercari, you can go ahead and take a screenshot now and send it to them through text. You can post it on Instagram, Facebook, wherever. I would really appreciate you sharing this video with anybody that you know, that you might find it helpful. Also go ahead and subscribe down below if you want to see more videos from me and also let me know what you think are you going to start something on our card.
Have you tried something Mercari? What is your opinion on Mercari? Is there anything that I missed that I should have mentioned in article? Leave your tips or comment down below. If you haven’t used the Meercari platform to sell your items, I hope you will give it a try. Thanks for reading my article.
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