Mercari is a Japanese C2C second-hand trading platform. It has a C2C (C2C) second-hand trading app for smartphones, as well as the "KAURU" service for books and CDs and the "MAISONZ" service for branded products.
According to data surveys, most of the platform's active users are housewives, and the most common item that users use Mercari to dispose of is unused clothing. But apart from that, Mercari has fully utilized the natural advantage of rich SKUs under the C2C model, and you can find basically anything, from luxury brands and 3C digital products to toothpaste and figurines. In the three years since its launch, the total number of product downloads has exceeded 32 million times, and the platform's monthly transaction volume has reached US$88 million.
The main product "mercari" has accumulated 108 million downloads and an average of approximately 10.3 million monthly active users (as of March 2018).
Reasons for Mercari’s success:
1. The unique awareness of local people about second-hand transactions: Japanese people have a strong awareness of environmental protection, sharing and other consumption concepts, and they often mention saving resources, so they are easily receptive to second-hand transactions. Jewelry, furniture, daily necessities, etc. can be seen everywhere on the streets of Japan. The Internet has only made the transaction of idle items that people are accustomed to more convenient.
2. A mature social credit system: The credit issues involved in second-hand transactions are of concern to many users. Many people are reluctant to conduct second-hand transactions online because there is no way to guarantee whether the items are what they see and whether the quality is guaranteed. Japan is a country with a very mature credit system, so there is no need to worry at all in this regard. Even if the products sold on Mercari are not genuine, the seller will mark it as such, effectively reducing communication costs and risk costs for buyers, thereby improving the transaction efficiency of idle items.
3. "Poor" young Japanese: Young Japanese have very low purchasing power, and the Japanese economy has been shrinking since Abe came to power. Therefore, more people are willing to trade second-hand items. On the one hand, they can buy cheap second-hand goods with guaranteed quality, and on the other hand, they can sell their idle items to people in need.
4. Profit model is the key: What really makes Mercari profitable is its profit model. In Japan, it charges a transaction fee of 10%. Through this simple and crude profit model, the company has made millions of dollars in profit by the end of 2015, less than two years after its establishment.
5. Conquer the U.S. market with mobile phones: Initially, Mercari hoped to develop the market by sending Japanese employees to the United States, but soon realized that this would not work because the market was dominated by Yahoo Auctions and others. However, they had one big thing in common, which was that they focused their energy on big sellers and ignored some individual users. This gave Mercari an opportunity, so in order to seize this market, Mercari decided to develop mobile phone users. After successfully launching the mobile sales experience, the platform grew rapidly.
Many sellers on Mercari don’t know how to withdraw money back to China, and the PayPal fees are too high. Here we recommend a cross-border payment platform to sellers - Airwallex, which supports payment withdrawals from 23 e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and eBay. Aiming at the pain points of sellers’ difficulty and slow withdrawals, Airwallex stands out and realizes cross-border payment withdrawals with fees as low as 0, and the funds are credited to the account within the same day. Airwalex payment account registration portal: https://channel.airwallex.com/q1a?utm_source=a116F00000FNDt4QAH
This is the end of this issue about Mercari. If you want to get more knowledge about Mercari, please pay attention and we will continue to answer your questions~
