What Is Mercari, and Can You Sign Up from Thailand?

A secondhand market Japanese people run themselves

Mercari is Japan's popular secondhand marketplace app: ordinary people selling to ordinary people. What gets listed is what someone in Japan used, over-bought, or no longer wants to keep — secondhand clothing and collectables through to car parts.

Sellers set their own prices, write their descriptions in Japanese, and most listings are one of a kind: once it sells, the listing is gone.

Why a Thai shopper cannot sign up for Mercari

The first wall is the phone number. Mercari sends its verification OTP to a Japanese number only, so a Thai number stops you right there.

The second is residence: you have to verify that you actually live in Japan.

Even with an account you would not get to the end. Mercari ships within Japan only, will not take an overseas address, and rejects cards issued outside Japan.

The account a Thai shopper actually needs is not a Mercari one — it is a Tama-Chan account, which takes a normal email and Thai mobile number.

So how do Thai shoppers buy from Mercari?

The route people use is to have someone with a Japanese account and a Japanese address buy on their behalf, receive the parcel in Japan, and send it on to Thailand. That is Tama-Chan's job, and the Mercari listings are pulled onto our own site.

The listing you see is the same one that sits on Mercari, except the price is already converted to baht with the yen figure beside it, you can negotiate with the seller, and the seller's Japanese description translates to Thai at the press of a button. That price is the item alone; the service fee and the freight home are separate, and both are on the fees and rates page.

The actual steps, from searching to the payment screen, are in the guide to ordering from Mercari, or see what the system does for you on the Mercari service page.

Frequently asked questions