How Mercari Uses Braze to Aid in Global Expansion

Through its partnership with Braze, Mercari is making steady progress in expanding the selling app’s popularity among U.S. consumers and is positioned for more growth globally.

70%

Increase in U.S. Gross Merchandise Volume Year over Year

For today’s online consumer, it's almost too easy to make purchases with the push of a button. However, selling items has typically been a challenge involving a clunky, multi-step user experience that makes it complicated to upload photos and descriptions of items. Mercari, the selling app, is changing this for U.S. consumers with their easy-to-use platform designed for selling items. Through its use of Braze, Mercari is making steady progress in expanding its popularity among U.S. consumers and is positioned for more growth globally.

Mercari Goal: Grow the Selling App’s Presence in the U.S.

Launched in Japan in 2013, Mercari has become the country's largest community-powered marketplace with 490 billion Japanese yen in transactions for the 12 months ending in June 2019. The company rolled out its U.S. app in 2014 and has been growing steadily.

Mercari Strategy: Use a Best-in-class Customer Engagement Platform

In a country with no shortage of buying options, Mercari wanted to position itself as a competitive differentiator. To do this, Mercari understood it needed to enlist the help of a leading customer engagement platform that would provide its users with a delightful, meaningful, and authentic experience.

The Braze platform is built to support a stronger understanding of customers and to enable relevant, personalized, targeted messaging at scale. As a result, Mercari was able to become a top selling app for American consumers looking to declutter their homes, to better reuse/recycle, and to simplify their lives.

Mercari Results: Increasing U.S. App Users and Sales Velocity

For nearly three years, Mercari has been actively using the Braze platform in the U.S. market. Mercari and Braze have grown the business together, reaching 2 million U.S. monthly active users and increasing U.S. gross merchandise volume—the total cost of items purchased—by 70% in the past year. More than 45 million Americans have downloaded the Mercari app to date, and Americans post more than 150,000 new listings daily.

Looking Ahead: Scaling Mercari Globally

Following the U.S. results, Mercari decided to expand its use of the Braze platform to include Japan.

“In recent quarters, we’ve significantly improved our customer experience, and those improvements are observable in increased customer LTV,” said Sho Masuda, VP of Growth Marketing, Mercari. “We feel great about Mercari’s opportunities in the U.S. and beyond. Based on the results we’ve seen, it was an easy decision to expand our use of Braze’s platform to include Japan, positioning the company for more growth in both countries and across the globe.”

Mercari is now using Braze in both countries as it seeks to increase the conversion rate of item listers, improve the performance of promotional campaigns, and increase the lifetime value of consumers through A/B testing campaigns.

To learn more about how Braze helps brands support brilliant customer experiences on mobile, email, and beyond, visit the Braze Client Stories page.

Braze Products Used

70%

Increase in U.S. Gross Merchandise Volume Year over Year