Selling used books on Amazon Japan vs Mercari Japan

5 comments

1. Mercari is way easier to set up an account.
   Probably cheaper than Amazon (they take a smaller cut) but I have not confirmed for books.

   Plus, once the seller acknowledges receipt and gives evaluation on Mercari you’re done.
   Amazon would probably have longer term customer management exposure.

   Shipping is easy with Mercari.

   I guess I vote Mercari.

2. Mercari.

   I have amazon seller account and they take too many fees…

   around 15% and a few other fees lol.

   Mercari is a flat 10%

3. As long as you book is up to A4 and 3cm thick you can send it cheaply and easy via Mercari.

   You will need a phone number and of course a bank account to transfer your money. Transfer fee is 200y per transfer I believe so it’s better to wait until most of your things are sold before processing

   Mercari has the comment section where people generally ask for discounts etc . You either like it or not but in case you don’t want to be bothered just put mentions like “no discounts no claim no return direct buying ok” on item description

4. Depends on what kind of books you’re selling. Mercari has a large user base but as everything is in Japanese, you basically miss out on the non-Japanese speaking customers.
   That’s where Amazon is better as they have an English interface.

   You can search for similar English books on Mercari and see if they are getting sold too. That might help to see how viable it is to sell there.

5. I’ve never sold on Mercari, but I unload a lot of my old books on Amazon Japan. I’ve had a seller account there for almost a decade and have sold over 100 books.

   Amazon’s fees are high, and get higher (as a percentage) the cheaper your item is. Also Japan Post and private shippers are always changing their rules, so you have to stay on top of it.

   Two examples: until about 2013, Yamato had a great service where you could send anything under 2 cm thick for 164 yen from a convenience store; you could address it yourself and just go there, pay, and send it. Then Japan Post claimed that it was violating their monopoly on sending private communications, and got the service banned. (And very soon after, began their own near-identical “Click-Post” service, which has since increased in price several times. It also requires you to have your own printer.)

   Another is how until 2018 or so you could send books of any size through JP as “Yu-Mail” (all forms of printed matter, including electronic), but then they suddenly limited packages to 3 cm in thickness, making even standard-sized North American paperbacks unsustainable.

   So you need to keep an eye on the shipping prices you had set in the past and be ready to adjust, lest you get stuck having to pay an exorbitant amount to send something. Also corporations will decide that people can’t sell used goods made by that corporation on Amazon and Amazon will kowtow to them; that’s one reason I’m thinking of trying to sell on Mercari too. (I’m not interested in the repeated-communication nonsense that seems to have become part of the culture there.)

   It’s a great way to recover some money for things you no longer need, particularly if you don’t have a lot of living space.