How To Buy Second-hand Goods on Mercari With Neokyo

If you’re looking to bolster your collection of items or find a highly specific piece of merchandise, there’s no better service to use than Mercari. With Mercari, which is now partnered with Neokyo, you can find a wide variety of second-hand goods, and using Neokyo, it’s never been easier to get them shipped from Japan straight to your door.

If you’re not sure how to do this, we’ve created this useful guide on buying second-hand items from Mercari using the Neokyo site, with some useful information on how to avoid common problems that you can run into.

Searching For Your Item

Using Neokyo’s search tool, you can enter any number of keywords to find your item on Mercari. Although when using Neokyo you can search in other languages and the words will auto-translate, we highly recommend inputting your search using Japanese characters.

There are a few ways to achieve this, from changing the language input on your computer or using translation tools to find the keywords you need.

Once you’ve got the keywords, input them into the Mercari search bar and hit search. You’ll receive a display of all of the listings for products associated with this keyword on the Mercari site.

Narrowing Down Your Search

There are a few essential ways to narrow down your search using various tools on the Neokyo site.

Firstly, you can sort by item condition. On the neokyo site, we use the same categories as those that you’d find on Mercari.

These labels are based on seller-submitted information. Use these tools to your advantage to find exactly what you need!

Mercari & Neokyo Partnership

Once you’ve found your item, it’s time to use Neokyo to your advantage to make paying and shipping much easier.

To place an order on Mercari using Neokyo, you’ll need to fill out a purchase request form.
Here’s some key facts to consider:

• Purchases are made in your name and are your responsibility.
• It is not possible to cancel a purchase once it has been paid for.
• We cannot negotiate the price of an item, book it to pay it later, nor ask questions to sellers (you can however ask us questions about the item description, the seller terms or its sale criteria).
• It is not possible to request the creation of a private account for your purchases on these platforms.

Reading Mercari Product Pages on Neokyo

If you’re having difficulty understanding what each part of our product page is for, here’s a handy guide:

• 1. Product Name (In Japanese)
• 2. Seller reputation
• 3. Product Condition
• 4. Product Price (in Japanese Yen and an estimation in your currency)
• 5. Product Name (In Japanese)
• 6. Button to create a buy request
• 7. Button to estimate total cost (including all fees)
• 8. Button to report seller

Postage & Delivering To Neokyo

Once you’ve found and selected your item, you’ll need to organise postage. Neokyo is based in Fukuoka prefecture, and so it must be possible to send the item to this area of Japan. For items that are unable to be delivered to Fukuoka, or for sellers that do not ship to proxy services, you may be unable to purchase it with Neokyo.

If you choose to purchase an item where postage is paid on arrival, we will only know the total price once the item has arrived in our warehouse, which will usually mean a new payment needs to be made when the item arrives at the Neokyo warehouse.

How long does it take for Neokyo to pay the seller? Why are requests sometimes not accepted?

On average, if everything goes smoothly, the seller is paid within 24 hours. In some cases and due to a common etiquette on Japanese marketplaces, we may first leave a purchase prompt which we need to be answered by the seller. It is therefore not unusual for your order to stay at the "Pending Merchant Payment" status for a while. It might reflect the following situations :

• If we left one, the seller did not respond to our purchase query. The purchase request would then usually be deemed as cancelled about 5 days after we posted our purchase prompt comment.
• The seller is requesting additional informations and awaits our response. The purchase confirmation might be slightly delayed.
• The seller does not deal with companies or services like Neokyo. It may take a few days before we are able to find out for this issue and refund your order. The seller is then blacklisted.

Common Problems

Although shopping with Mercari is generally very safe, as a public marketplace, some sellers will attempt to take advantage of you. For advice on how to avoid common issues, you can read our new blog post on How To Shop Safely with Mercari.