Sure can, but like any side hustle, there’s a few best practices you need to follow. One, you should probably just start off selling what you already have. Declutter your crib, list anything you can live without, and learn the ropes without risking any money, right? You’d be surprised how much you can find if you go through every drawer, cabinet, closet, your kitchen, garage, backyard, everything. Then you could ask friends and family if they have anything.
Now any sale you make on the Mercari app is pure profit, right, so you’re getting paid to figure it out. Another thing you can do, if you have similar items, like a bunch of jeans that are all the same size, for example, is list ’em in bundles. I’ve seen a lot of the top Mercari sellers say that bundles sell way better than standalone items. Everyone wants a deal, I suppose. Plus, if it’s something that’s lightweight, it probably justifies the shipping cost if they’re getting more than one of ’em.
The next thing you absolutely must do if you wanna make money with Mercari? Is take great photos of everything you list. You want clear, high-res images that cover every angle. Make sure the lighting’s good. Don’t have anything distracting going on in the background. Put yourself in your buyers’ shoes. They’re about to order something they can’t touch or try on or even see in person. That’s a big leap of faith. Put their mind at ease with lots of awesome, well-thought-out pics.
Also, you gotta write detailed descriptions. That’s the next thing people are gonna check out after they cruise through the photos. Give ’em all the info they’d need to make a buying decision. If not, if they have to reach out to get a question answered, they might end up finding an alternative in the meantime and just going with that. Maybe it’s on Mercari or maybe it’s on another platform altogether, like Poshmark. But people aren’t gonna wait around, so you best be thorough.
What else? You wanna make sure and put keywords in your titles. What are people most likely to type into the Mercari search bar to find what you’re selling? That’s what needs to be in your listing titles. You can peek at competitors to see what they’re putting in their titles, you can do some Google searches and see what all Google suggests, you can poll anyone around you and see what they would search for to find a particular item, and then there’s paid tools you can use if you really want to.
Next, pricing. You can’t afford to mess this up. Easiest way to make sure your prices are where they need to be, once again, is just to glance at what other sellers are listing similar items for. Filter the search results by “sold” items just to be safe; you wanna know what people were actually willing to pay, right? Then, when people like/heart one of your listings, what you can do is “send offers to likers.” With just a couple clicks, Mercari will let you blast out an offer to everyone who’s interacted with that listing. Reduce the price by ten percent or so and it should sell fast.
If not, consider trying Mercari’s “smart pricing” option. Enter in a “set price” and a “floor price” and let their sophisticated AI optimize it so that it sells quickly. And if that still doesn’t work, simply relist your old items. Literally delete the original one and then run it back. It’s like hitting the refresh button on your browser. You’ll show up in the “new arrivals” and hopefully back towards the top of the search results. Or, if all this sounds like way too much fuss for way too little margin? See below.
