Trouble is bound to happen sooner or later when you buy and sell on Mercari.
I’ve made over 100 transactions myself, and the other day I ran into my first real problem.
What I bought was a coffee machine, and some of its functions didn’t work.
When I contacted the seller, they told me they had checked that it worked properly before listing it and that it had been fine.
Mercari’s FAQ has an entry for “the item that arrived is different from the description / is broken.”
However, it basically says that the seller and buyer should discuss the matter between themselves, and for returns it describes agreeing on who pays the return shipping and then cancelling the transaction.
In other words, the transaction guide makes it feel like your only options are to return the broken item or accept it as is.
Depending on the item, though, only part of it may be broken while everything else works fine.
And if that particular function isn’t especially important to you,
you might feel that the full listing price is a bit much, but a discounted price would be acceptable.
In that situation, you can arrange a partial refund.
You can’t do it unilaterally, but if you and the other party reach an agreement, you can contact Mercari’s support team.
In my case, I proposed a partial refund and sent an inquiry to the support team.
They replied: “Please have the buyer and seller decide on the refund amount, then contact us again through the inquiry form with that amount.”
Once we agreed and settled on the refund amount, I reported it, the partial refund went through without any issues, and I was able to complete the transaction.
The support team responded very quickly—from the moment I told them I wanted to arrange a partial refund, it took only about a day to decide the amount and receive the money.
No matter how careful you are, problems can still happen with Mercari transactions.
When something goes wrong on Mercari, you have to negotiate with the other party and settle it yourselves; the fact that Mercari has no fixed protocol or procedure was quite confusing at first.
In my case, the other party was very reasonable, so resolving the issue went very smoothly.
Apparently, if you can’t reach the other party, you can also ask Mercari’s support team to force the transaction to close.
Incidentally, for the coffee machine I bought, I was refunded about 40% of the purchase price.
But after the transaction closed, I took it apart to see whether I could fix it and found a water leak. I decided it was too dangerous to use and ended up throwing it away.
In the end, maybe I should have just returned it…