If you do any online reselling, you’re probably familiar with selling on eBay and Poshmark and maybe even Facebook Marketplace. However, right now, one of the big places to sell is Mercari. Read on for tips on decluttering with Mercari.
How Does Decluttering With Mercari Work?
Mercari, like many sales sites, is a website with an app where you can list your items for sale. They make it as easy as possible. You simply snap a photo of the item you want to sell, provide a bit of data about the item, pick a sales price, and boom, done! When a seller buys your item, Mercari sends you a shipping label, which you print and place on your package. Mercari even gives you a suggested range of prices for your item based on how similar items have sold. If your goal is to get the item out of your house as quickly as possible, you can price on the lower end of the range.
Mercari also lets buyers “favorite” items, and if someone has favorited your item, you have the ability to send them a deal price of at least 10% off. This can be a great way to quickly snag an interested buyer. Buyers can also make you an offer to buy your item at a lower price, which you can accept or counter.
What Does It Cost?
Mercari is free to list. You only pay if your item sells. Mercari charges 10% of the sales price, plus a processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30. They are up front about this – when you list your item for certain price, Mercari tells you what your payment will be. I appreciate the transparency.
If you sell an item for $100, Mercari takes $10 as their cut, and then you pay an additional $3.20 in processing fees, so you take home $87.80.
You also have the option to cover shipping – though when I sell my items, I always have the buyer pay shipping. Mercari provides you with a label, so it’s super easy.
Shipping Tips
One good and bad thing about Mercari is that they offer different shipping options based on what you are shipping. You pick this when you list your item. That means that Mercari will pick the best service for you – but be warned, that could mean that you’re shipping UPS, USPS, or FedEx – and they each have different requirements for dropoffs. Thankfully, you can do most FedEx dropoffs at select Walgreens stores, UPS at select CVS, and your mail carrier should take USPS. But you could sell three things one day and have to go to three different locations to ship them.
When you list your items, double check the shipping weight. You don’t necessarily have to weigh your item, but you do want to be sure that shipping weight doesn’t look exceptionally light. You don’t want your package to be under postage. This is especially likely if you’re shipping more than one of something (like a couple of shirts, an assortment of books, a set of children’s clothes, etc.).
Always be sure to safely pack your items. If your item is damaged in transit and it’s clear it’s because you packed it poorly, you’re very unlikely to get paid.
How Do You Get Paid?
So after all of that, how do you get paid when decluttering with Mercari? It’s easy. Once the item is received by the buyer, they rate you. Mercari then prompts you to rate the buyer, and after that, the funds are released to your Mercari account. From there, you can request a fee-free transfer to your bank account, which takes a few days. You can also use the funds immediately to shop on Mercari.
So far, I’ve sold about $150 worth of things that were just taking space in my house. Decluttering with Mercari has been a fun way to clean out my house and make some money as well.
Read More:
- Decluttering and Sunk Costs
- The 30 Day Decluttering Challenge
- Can You Earn Money Selling Young Living?
Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
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