How to see what things really sell for on Mercari Japan (in English and US dollars)

Mercari Japan (メルカリ) is Japan's largest marketplace for second-hand goods. Trading cards, anime figures, film cameras, game consoles: Japanese sellers list them there all day, and a lot of what collectors and resellers abroad look for shows up there first.

If you buy in Japan and sell abroad, or you just want to know what your card is worth, the number that matters is not the asking price. It is the sold price: what someone actually paid.

Getting those numbers by hand is slow. Listings are in Japanese, sold items are behind a filter, prices are in yen, and copying a hundred rows into a sheet takes an hour.

This guide shows a faster way: a ready-made scraper that turns a Mercari Japan search, sold items included, into a table with prices in yen and US dollars and titles in English. No Mercari account, no browser extension, no proxy of your own.

What you get

For each item of a search (or of a seller's list):

• the title, and the title in English if you ask for it
• the price in yen and in US dollars
• the status: on sale, in trade or sold
• the condition, and who pays for shipping
• brand, category, listing and update time, photos
• the bids, for the listings that are auctions

For each item you open in full, also:

• the description and every photo
• the category path, likes and comments
• the shipping method, where it ships from, days to ship
• item details such as card rarity, size or model
• the seller's ratings (good, normal, bad), star score, number of items and join date

Step 1: choose your keyword

Mercari Japan search works best in Japanese, the language the sellers write in. Brand and model names often work as they are.

The narrower the keyword, the cleaner the price. ポケモンカード brings every card; a card's name, such as ミュウex SAR, brings that card.

Step 2: get the sold prices

Open the ready-made task Track Pokemon card sold prices on Mercari Japan, change the keyword to yours and press Start.

Or set it up yourself. These are the settings that matter:

{ "searches": ["ミュウex SAR"], "status": "sold", "sort": "newest", "maxItemsPerSearch": 240, "translateTitles": true } 

• status: sold returns only items that sold.
• sort: newest puts the newest first.
• maxItemsPerSearch is how many items to return: 120 by default, up to 1,200.
• translateTitles adds an English title to every row.

You can put several searches in one run, one per line. Export the result as CSV or Excel, or open it in Google Sheets.

Step 3: work out a fair price

A few habits make the numbers more useful:

• Use the median, not the average. One odd price or a bundle of ten cards pulls the average far off. In Google Sheets, =MEDIAN(H2:H241), where H is the price_usd column.
• Compare like with like. Filter by condition: "New, unused" and "No noticeable scratches or stains" sell at different prices.
• Look at who pays for shipping. shipping_paid_by: seller means the price already covers postage inside Japan.
• Read the titles. Bundles (まとめ, セット) and empty boxes (空箱) turn up in searches too.
• Keep auctions apart. Their rows carry the bids in an auction field.

Step 4: use the site's own filters

Mercari's search page has filters for price range, category, condition and sold items. Set them on jp.mercari.com, copy the address of the page and paste it as a search. The link keeps its filters, for example:

https://jp.mercari.com/search?keyword=ポケモンカード&status=sold_out&price_min=1000 

Step 5: get new listings and price drops every hour

Good items at a good price go fast. To see them as they come, give the run a watch list name and put it on a schedule, for example every hour. The first run returns everything. Every later run with the same name returns only:

• new listings in your search,
• items whose price, title or status changed, for example from on sale to sold, with the old value next to the new one,
• items that are gone. These rows are free.

Rows that did not change are not stored and not charged, so a check every hour costs only what changed. The task Get new Mercari Japan listings and price drops is set up this way. A search sorted by newest listings works best for a watch:

{ "searches": ["https://jp.mercari.com/search?keyword=ミュウex%20SAR&sort=created_time&order=desc"], "maxItemsPerSearch": 120, "translateTitles": true, "watchName": "mew cards" } 

Connect the run to Slack, Gmail or Google Drive with Apify's integrations, and the changes come to you.

Step 6: check a seller before you buy

Paste a seller's link, or the link of one of their items, and you get the seller's profile: good, normal and bad ratings, star score, items listed, followers and join date, plus up to 300 of their items. That helps when you buy through a buying service and cannot ask the seller yourself.

Most Mercari sellers are private persons, and their public name and ratings are personal data. Collect them only for a purpose the rules that apply to you allow, and do not use them to contact or profile people.

What it costs

You pay per row the scraper stores:

A run also costs $0.005 to start. A search of 120 items costs $0.24, or $0.36 with English titles. You do not pay for what the scraper could not read, for rows of items that are gone, or for unchanged rows of a watch list. Apify's free plan includes $5 of usage a month, which is about 2,500 listed items. On Apify's paid plans the prices per row are lower.

Limits worth knowing

• Mercari Japan only, not Mercari US. Prices are in yen, text in Japanese as the sellers wrote it.
• Up to 1,200 items per search and 300 per seller, in the order Mercari shows them.
• Items sold by Mercari Shops (shops, not people) come in search rows but are not opened one by one.
• A deleted item cannot be read, and it is not charged. A sold item can still be read.
• English titles are machine translation. Card names and slang may come out odd; the Japanese title is always there.
• US dollar prices use the European Central Bank's rate of the day the run started; the rate is in every row.

Try it

The scraper is Mercari Japan Scraper on Apify. If a field you need is missing, write on its Issues tab with the search or item link.

Mercari is a trademark of Mercari, Inc. The scraper is not affiliated with or endorsed by Mercari.