Mercari Discontinues Smart Offers; Sellers Wonder If Promotion Changes Are Intentional Or A Glitch
UPDATE 12-9-24
Mercari is finally backtracking on fee changes it made earlier this year, announcing new fee structure that splits fees between buyers and sellers will take effect January 6, 2025.
Liz Morton
Mercari US has reportedly discontinued Smart Offers feature which allowed users to automate certain selling functions, adding manual effort to seller workflows with very little notice or time to adjust.
What are Smart Offers?
Here's how Mercari describes the feature, on their help page which has not yet been updated to show it has been discontinued:
Buyers are free to make an offer on your item or on a bundle of your items. In response, you can accept, decline, or make a counteroffer. If you don’t want to negotiate on the price of your item, we suggest indicating in the item description that your price is firm.
When you set up your listing or when you edit an existing listing, you can enable Smart Offers. Smart Offers saves you time by allowing you to set a minimum price for your listing, and it automatically provides a one-time counter offer for you within your acceptable price range.
When an offer comes in, if it is within the price range that you set, it will be accepted. If the offer is not in range, a one-time counteroffer will be sent automatically to negotiate with the shopper.
But sellers on Reddit say they received emails very abruptly advising Smart Offers have been discontinued, effective November 4th, 2024 and that all listings which previously used the feature will now need to be managed manually.
One of the few good changes they ever implemented, I just set the price and wait for the sale. If it was in the range auto accept, offer too low, it automatically countered at 10% off. I loved this feature.
Dang. Wonder if it has to do with people not paying attention to their listings? You would think someone that puts this on would be active but never know on Mercari
This feature was perfect because I don't get enough Mercari views/offers to keep the app on my phone and check in all the time, but can easily ship out within a day. Felt like it really added lots of value, saved me time, and led to me listings some items I probably won't both with in the future.
Meanwhile, other sellers have been noticing unannounced changes to how Promotions work, with the previously enforced 10 per day limit seemingly removed - but is it an intentional move to goose Q4 sales on the platform or a glitch?
Here's how the Promote button is supposed to work, according to Mercari's help page, clearly showing there limit should be 10 items per day.
Promote: Want to boost your listing in the search results?
If you reduce the price of your listing by 5% or more, we’ll boost your listing in the search results and also notify all the people who liked your item about the price reduction.
You can Promote up to 10 listings per day, and a single item can be promoted once every 24 hours.
Don’t forget that to Promote the same item again, the new price needs to be at least 5% lower than the historically lowest price, and can never be lower than $1.
Promote is a permanent price drop. If you have Smart Pricing and/or Smart Offers enabled and you promote below the minimum price you set, these features will no longer work, because your current listing price is below your minimum price.
To adjust your minimum price range to enable Smart Pricing or Smart Offers, go to your listings, select the listing and click edit to adjust your pricing.
But sellers on Reddit say over the last few days they've suddenly been able to promote a seemingly unlimited amount of listings per day.
Unlimited Daily Promoted Items
Is this a new update or just a glitch? I just not promoted all 100+ of my items, when obvi usually you're limited to 10.
I wonder if this will be announced soon as a new feature or if this is a bug- Working for me still...Promoted well over 150 items
Promoting listings
Usually Mercari limits me to 10 promotions per day on listings. Lately, it has not been limiting. I can mark down as many items as I want now. Would anyone know why?
Mercari does not appear to have officially acknowledged the change on way or the other, leaving sellers still wondering if it is a glitch that could be "fixed" at any time.
Updates on the button glitch?
Have any of you seen any updates on the button glitch? You know such as it not being a glitch and a new update instead? They still haven't fixed it if it is a glitch.
Mercari has been struggling since launching a new fee structure in March, removing selling fees and shifting the fee burden to the buyer side of the sale instead.
The company faced pushback from buyers who experienced massive sticker shock when seeing additional fees tacked on at checkout, with some making unflattering comparisons to airline fees or worse yet - buying tickets from Ticketmaster!
Buyers were particularly taken aback because the fees were variable and could sometimes exceed the 10% fee that had previously been applied on the seller side, raising serious concerns about transparency that have forced Mercari to test showing buyer fees on the item page before checkout to stem the tide of abandoned carts.
Unfortunately, the fee structure shakeup hasn't been working as well as Mercari had hoped, leading to a mass layoff of ~45% staff in June with US CEO John Lagerling admitting the change had increased the number of listings on the site, but had "not delivered the short-term results that we had hoped for on the buyer/ GMV side."
Liz Morton
Mercari is facing increasing pressure from their shareholders in Japan to address the continued woeful underperformance and lack of GMV (Gross Merchandise Volume) growth of their US marketplace.
CEO Shintaro Yamada told investors in September that the new fee structure seems to be driving an increase in lower average order values with higher priced items being passed up due to the fees at checkout.
Some have even suggested Mercari may eventually look to close or sell off the US business if performance does not improve, and while Yamada does not go that far, he does at least allow for the possibility that entering into a partnership with another company could be one avenue they may explore.
The US marketplace seems increasingly desperate to find ways to reverse the sales decline, recently surveying sellers about the fee changes and how they have impacted average order values.
Liz Morton
Encouraging or enabling sellers to promote more items won't help with the average order value problem (since it requires a 5% discount) but could help to temporarily boost overall GMV by stimulating more sales at lower prices - which may be enough to buy Lagerling time, at least until next year.
Then again, it's entirely possible it could just be a glitch, as users report they are seeing more frequent technical issues on the site (and longer delays in support responses) since those layoffs in June.
How will Mercari ending Smart Offers impact your selling and do you think the Promotion changes are a glitch or intentional quiet GMV boosting update? Let us know in the comments below!
