How to Send Offers on Mercari: A Seller’s Guide
If you have ever watched a listing sit for two weeks with four likes and zero sales, you already know the feeling. Sending an offer is one of the most direct things you can do to break that stall, and Mercari makes it reasonably straightforward once you know the mechanics.
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How Sending Offers on Mercari Works
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Mercari gives sellers two ways to send offers: the Offer to Likers feature and the standard counteroffer when a buyer messages you first. Both let you negotiate price, but they work differently and show up in different parts of the app.
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Offer to Likers lets you send a private, discounted price to everyone who has liked your listing. The buyer gets a notification, and the offer is only visible to them, not to the general public browsing your shop. The offer expires after 24 hours if nobody takes it.
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Counteroffers happen inside a bundle or in response to a buyer-initiated offer. You can accept, decline, or counter with a different number. These also have a short expiration window, usually 24 hours.
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Both types require you to drop the price at least a little. Mercari does not let you send an offer that matches your current listing price, so build that into your pricing strategy from the start. For a deeper look at how all of Mercari’s promotion tools fit together, the practical guide to promoting on Mercari covers the full picture.
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How to Send an Offer to Likers Step by Step
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This is the feature most sellers use most often, so here is exactly how to do it.
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- Open the Mercari app and go to your My Page, then tap My Listings.
- Tap the listing you want to send the offer on.
- Tap the Offer/Promote button. If the listing has at least one liker, you will see the option to send an offer.
- Set your offer price. Mercari requires it to be lower than the current listing price. A drop of 10 to 20 percent tends to trigger the buyer’s notification in a way that feels like a real deal rather than a rounding error.
- Tap Send. Every current liker gets a push notification with your offer price.
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A few things worth knowing before you start sending:
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- You can only send an Offer to Likers once every 7 days per listing.
- If the buyer buys the item at the offer price, the sale goes through automatically. No extra steps.
- Once you send the offer, you cannot edit the listing price until the offer expires or is declined.
- Offer to Likers is not available on every listing. If you do not see the button, the listing may not have any likers yet, or it may not be eligible.
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For more detail on this specific feature, including edge cases and bundling, the Mercari Offer to Likers guide is worth a read.
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How Much to Discount: Finding the Right Offer Price
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This is where most sellers either leave money on the table or scare buyers off with a 2 percent markdown that nobody notices. The right discount depends on how long the item has been sitting and what your margin looks like.
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| Days Listed | Suggested Discount | Why It Works |
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| 7 to 14 days | 10 to 15 percent | Fresh enough that a small nudge can convert a liker who was on the fence |
| 15 to 30 days | 15 to 20 percent | Buyers who liked it early have moved on; you need a bigger reason to re-engage them |
| 30 plus days | 20 to 30 percent | The listing is stale; a meaningful markdown is more honest and more effective |
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Before you set a number, check your comps. Search the same item on Mercari and filter by Sold. If similar items are selling at $18 and yours is listed at $24, even a 15 percent offer only gets you to about $20, which is still above the going rate. Either relist at a more competitive price or go deeper on the offer.
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Also factor in Mercari’s seller fee (currently 10 percent) and shipping. A discount that wipes out your margin is not a sale, it is a donation.
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When to Send Offers vs. When to Relist
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Sending an offer and relisting are two different tools, and knowing which one to reach for saves time. An offer makes sense when the listing has engagement, meaning likers, recent views, or a buyer who already messaged you. If the listing has zero likers and low views, an offer will not reach anyone worth reaching.
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Relisting is the better move for a stale listing with no engagement. A relist bumps the item to the top of search results and gives it a fresh timestamp. Think of offers as closing a warm lead and relisting as generating new ones.
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If you have a lot of stale inventory, working through it manually every day gets old fast. That is where a tool like SellerSync helps. It handles the repetitive side, scheduled relists, price drop reminders, and promotion timing, so you are not doing the same five taps on your phone every morning for 40 listings.
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For a practical routine around relisting, the how to relist on Mercari guide walks through when and how to do it without tanking your existing engagement.
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Responding to Buyer Offers and Counteroffers
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Buyers can also send you offers, usually a lowball that arrives right after you have mentally already spent the money. Here is how to handle them without leaving a sale on the table.
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Do not auto-decline low offers. A buyer offering $8 on a $25 item is not necessarily a bad buyer. They might just be testing to see if you are willing to move at all. Counter with something closer to your floor, say $20, and see what happens. A short back-and-forth is normal.
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Know your floor before you respond. Before any offer comes in, decide the lowest price you will accept given your fees, cost of goods, and time. That number should be in your head before you open the message, not calculated in the moment under pressure to make a sale.
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Respond quickly. Buyer offers expire in 24 hours, but buyer attention spans are shorter. If someone is in a buying mood and you wait 18 hours to counter, they may have already bought the same thing somewhere else.
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Declining is fine. If an offer is below your floor, decline it cleanly. You can leave a short note like “happy to negotiate closer to the listing price,” but you do not owe anyone a sale at a price that does not work for you. For more on building a pricing floor that actually makes sense, the Mercari pricing strategy guide is a solid reference.
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Frequently Asked Questions
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Can I send offers to buyers who haven’t liked my listing?
\nNo. The Offer to Likers feature only reaches people who have tapped the heart icon on your listing. You cannot send a mass offer to all Mercari buyers or to followers of your shop.
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How often can I send an Offer to Likers on the same listing?
\nMercari limits you to once every 7 days per listing. If you send an offer and nobody takes it, you have to wait out the full week before you can send another one on that same item.
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Does sending an offer bump my listing in search?
\nNot directly. The offer goes to existing likers only and does not affect your search ranking. To get more visibility at the same time, you can also use Mercari’s promote feature, which does give a temporary boost in search. Here is how promoting on Mercari works if you want to use both tools together.
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What happens if two people both have my listing liked and one of them buys it at the offer price?
\nAs soon as one buyer purchases the item, the listing closes and the other likers’ offers are automatically cancelled. You only sell the item once.
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Should I lower my listing price instead of sending an offer?
\nSometimes yes. If you lower the listing price publicly, it can show up in search results and attract new buyers who never liked it. An Offer to Likers is private and only reaches your existing pool of likers. For a slow listing with few likers, a public price drop or relist may do more work.
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Sending offers is one of the simpler habits you can build into your weekly selling routine. Check your oldest listings with likers, send a reasonable offer, and move on. Done consistently, it is one of the lowest-effort ways to convert inventory that is already most of the way there.
We build SellerSync, a Chrome extension that takes the busywork out of selling on Mercari, so you can spend less time managing listings and more time sourcing and shipping.