Secondhand market Mercari links with Alibaba to sell in China

Mar 02, 2021 | News On Japan

Mar 02, 2021 (Nikkei) - Japanese flea market app Mercari will sell products in China through Alibaba Group Holding's e-commerce platforms, accelerating its expansion overseas.

Mercari will list part of its secondhand items on Taobao, one of China's biggest e-commerce sites, and Xianyu, the leading Chinese flea market platform with over 90 million monthly users, the Japanese company said.

When an order is placed through these Alibaba group platforms, an e-commerce startup called Beenos will buy the items from Mercari as a proxy, then ship them to the actual customers.

Tokyo-listed Mercari, which saw a growth opportunity in a Japanese trend to declutter, began selling products in roughly 100 countries in 2019. The company is trying to build an ecosystem around its app and its related mobile payment service Merpay.

It partnered last year with Sea Group-owned Shopee, one of the biggest e-commerce platforms in Taiwan and Southeast Asia, to sell products in Taiwan.

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