Are you getting deeply concerned that your Mercari sales are declining day by day? Have you ever had the feeling that something is amiss with the way you sell? Let’s see if our tips and tricks for mercari can help you figure things out.
In the correct circumstances, you should be able to make sales on mercari with a little direction. We have compiled a list of tips for mercari that you can use to sell your items FAST. Our tips go into detail on:
- Improving your listings
- Automatically listing to other marketplaces with a crosslister app
- Getting your items to the top of search by relisting (Manually and automatically!)
- Negotiation tips
and more!
Improve Your Photos (Seriously)
In any article we’ve ever written to help sellers one of our first tips is that you should understand the importance of the images you put on your listing. It’s very simple really:
Imagine that you are in a busy shopping district, think about these things:
- What makes you decide whether you go into one store and not the other ?
- Why do most shops you see have huge windows letting you peek through rather than completely closed brick walls ?
It is because first impressions matter, they always have and they always will. When you are competing against countless other sellers you need to grab the attention of potential buyers very quickly!
The Light NEEDS to be Right
There is a serious problem plaguing sellers on mercari. That problem is listings with horrible light! You cannot expect many buyers to purchase things that they cannot see. You certainly wouldn’t, so why would you expect anyone else to ?
You can improve the lighting conditions on your listings with this simple trick: Take your photos in the daytime under natural light. Natural light is one of the softest forms of light that can really enhance the beauty of your products. It gives your products a “real-life feel” compared to using artificial light.
Invest in an Editing App
Our next trick for mercari is related to including editing software in your workflow. When you first start out on mercari it is common to just take a photo and that’s that. However, you reach a certain point where your listings do not compare or stand out when looking at similar sellers. Investing in editing software can give your photos an edge.
Now, when we talk about editing, we definitely do not encourage turning your products into something they are not. The things in your photo that you can and should edit include things such as the background.
Many editing tools allow you to remove the background of your photo in order to have a solid white background or any colour you’d like! This approach can really help you “center” your item, removing all possible distractions in the surrounding when the photo was taken.
When considering software we recommend looking for tools that support “batch processing” which simply means it allows you to apply the same effect on multiple items at once, this will save you a lot of time in the long run.
Model/Stage Your Items
This trick for mercari tends to take a lot of time, this is why many sellers do not take advantage of it. You should definitely consider modeling/staging your items if you can. The modeling industry is BIG for a reason, it’s because you give the buyer an opportunity to imagine what it would be like to own the item you are currently selling! Developing some emotional connection to a specific item will increase their chances of buying it.
If you sell clothes you can find all sorts of reasons not to model your clothes. Maybe you find modeling your items to be too much work or you are bit camera shy. Regardless of your reason you still have options. The best is: purchasing a mannequin.
You should invest some money to purchase a mannequin, this way you do not have to model the clothes and/or show yourself on camera. A mannequin is a good middle ground and allows buyers to see how an item “drapes” once it is put on.
Clothes are not the only items that you can stage. There are lots of ways to stage non-clothing items by making your photo include elements that match the theme of the item.
Here is an example for you:
If you were selling football/soccer gear you could take photos of the item on grass/in a field.
Take More Photos
This mercari tip helps you solve a long-standing problem. If you sell online via marketplaces then you are no stranger to potential buyers asking you the dreaded question: “Can I have more photos please”. Now you have to bust out the camera, find your item, and take more photos.
We are sorry to tell you that if this happens a whole lot then it is 100% on you. You need to expect that this will happen because many buyers like to see all possible angles of an item to help them in their decision to buy or not. If you want a trick for selling on mercari then this is it!
Make the customer’s job easier by including images so they don’t have to ask. Less friction = Faster sales.
Make Your Descriptions Comprehensive AND Honest
One Mercari tip that will be sure to guarantee results involves you paying attention to the quality of your descriptions. If your images are your visual first impression, then your descriptions are the first word that comes out of your mouth.
A good-looking person who insults you once they speak is not so good, are they? If you apply this same logic to your mercari descriptions then you will follow some principles to make sure your descriptions give off the right message.
Mercari gives you a decent word count so you ought to take advantage of it. Your description should include as much detail as possible. The best way to figure out what you should add to your description is to think about what some buyers frequently ask about. These types of things include:
- Size
- Colour
- Material
- Elaborating more on the items condition.
The last point forces us to have a difficult conversation about honesty. Your descriptions on mercari need to be honest.
Every seller would like to say the best things about their items and only that. Sure using the term “Excellent Condition” is useful when it comes to convincing people to purchase but if that doesn’t reflect the actual condition of the item then you should expect a lot of unsatisfied customers and refund requests.
If you take this mercari tip seriously then you’ll realize that the goal here is to describe your listing as honestly as possible. Is your item defective in some way? make sure to include AND highlight the nature of the defects on your items.
Relist Relist Relist!
Seasoned mercari sellers are fully aware of an effective trick to selling on mercari: Relist!
Relisting on mercari is similar to doing the same on any other platform. To relist you need to create a new listing that has all the details from your old listings.
On mercari all you need to do is go to your listings page and then click the ‘Relist’ button next to the listing you want to relist. This will copy over the details from the item into the new listing form on mercari then all you have to do is list the item again by pressing the button on the form.
Afterward, you just have to delete the old listing and you are all set! We recommend doing this if your listing has been up for some time and has gotten no sales or traction at all.
Sell Less Common Items on Mercari
Mercari is a reselling platform that is full of second-hand clothes as well as other items. The thing is many of these items that are selling come from brands you have never heard of in your life AND are of questionable quality.
Now when you see a product that goes against the grain and is from a popular brand, the listing stands out a bit doesn’t it? Selling products from popular brands is an under-utilized trick for mercari.
There is a certain appeal that products from popular brands have. Most of these companies spend millions to put their ads in front of our eyes and portray a specific image, so when you sell branded products on mercari a lot of the hard ‘Marketing’ work is already done for you. In the eyes of potential buyers your branded product is leaps above the usual low-quality item on mercari.
For example, You KNOW that lots of people already like Nike products and many of them will be searching all the marketplace sites they can in order to get a good deal for the items they want.
You should research brands that seem to sell well on the platform and keep an eye out for them when you source items.
This is marketing 101: Different brands have different meanings to different people.
A teenage boy into streetwear may have a greater desire to purchase a discounted sneaker on mercari than someone else.
Engage With Negotiators
No seller is a fan of a haggler! but without them, many sales simply wouldn’t have happened. A great tip for mercari selling is that you should engage with negotiators.
Think about it, absolutely everyone negotiates for better prices on mercari. When you list your product the odds are you have listed it for slightly higher than the lowest price you are willing to accept.
If you aren’t doing this then you absolutely should because many people will negotiate the price down anyways. Negotiating is the prime way for you to keep the margins in your reselling business healthy!
Here is an example for you:
Let’s say you want to sell some used jeans for $19 at least! then you can set your price around $29 knowing that you’d be perfectly fine if the price were to fall a bit when you negotiate.
Remember that communication is key on mercari. Although many buyers will try to negotiate anyways you should state whether you are firm on your prices or not, it will not remove the hagglers but it should reduce it quite a bit.
Now whether you negotiate or not, there are always people who will try to offer the most insulting price possible and we do not recommend you engage with them. The best response to these users is to state your price firmly and thank them for their time.
Before you go into negotiations, you need to really ask yourself what the lowest possible price you are willing to accept is and then enter your negotiations with that at the back of your mind.
Take Advantage of Bundles
The previous tip for mercari feeds into this next selling tip. Simply engaging in negotiations with buyers gives you the chance to offer bundles. Bundles allow you to sell more items and increase your average order value (More money per sale). We recommend writing in your description or somewhere on your profile stating that you are open to bundling your items.
If a potential buyer agrees to a bundle then you just have to create one for them and notify them about it. The simplest way to make bundles on mercari is to create a listing that contains images for all the items you will bundle at the decided price.
Learn to Price Intelligently
Finding the right price is a painful and often manual process but it’s the difference between making sales and no sales. Mastering the art of intelligent pricing is the trick to selling more on mercari. Once again, it’s paramount to understand what your desired profit margins are before you can fully take advantage of altering your prices while remaining profitable.
There are several features you can take advantage of in order to price your items better.
Use a fee calculator
You can use a mercari fee calculator to quickly understand what your fees will be. This is the first step to ensuring you set the most profitable price.
Use the smart pricing feature
Remember when we said that finding the right price is often manual? Well, Mercari has a smart pricing feature that will automate the process for you.
Here is how it works: You will set a floor price which is the minimum your listing can get sold for and mercari will automatically update your listing price for you until the item either sells or the price reaches your floor price.
The floor price is an excellent mechanism to protect your profits and you can opt to turn it on/off any time you want.
Mercari updates the price based on their algorithm which considers the demand for your product. It’s a fantastic way to save time and increase your chances of selling on Mercari because they own the platform and have all the information to detect when your listing is most likely to get sold and for what price.
Use the offer to likers and promote feature
If you have used another marketplace like poshmark before you’ll know that making changes to your prices has interesting effects, this is the same on mercari. On Mercari when you drop your prices the people who liked that listing get notified about this listing. Understandably, this boosts the traffic you can get to your mercari shop.
You can either use the promote feature or the send offer to likers feature to accomplish this. The promote feature will notify everyone that liked your products about a price drop greater than or equal to 5% while the offer to likers feature will notify the most recent 50 likers about price drops greater than or equal to 10%.
You can take these actions twice on multiple listings but you will have to reduce them lower than the previous lowest drop.
This is why we stress once again: You need to know what your desired profit margins are, so you are actually making money at the end of all this.
Crosslist to Other Marketplaces
In all our tips for mercari this one has to be one of the best ones. Selling on mercari is a wonderful experience for many AS there are lots of buyers searching for items on the platform at any given time. However, there are also several marketplaces just as popular and even more popular than mercari.
Now imagine if you could list to them as well?
Crosslisting allows you to do just that and grow your sales astronomically, but it is typically done manually which dissuades a lot of sellers from doing it. With a crosslisting app you will be able to list a product to multiple marketplaces in one click.
You can try our crosslisting tool for FREE here