Mercari uses the word proxy itself. In 2019 it called Buyee "a proxy service for crossborder e-commerce". Such a service buys on Mercari Japan for people abroad and ships the item to them. That is the kind of proxy the searches around Mercari point to, and Mercari now lists 54 official ones. Buyers in the United States, Taiwan and Hong Kong also have Mercari's own Global App. A proxy server changes your IP address and leaves Mercari's account rules where they are. The Japanese terms define a user as an individual residing in Japan. The US terms ask you to reside in the United States.
We read Mercari's terms, help articles, privacy policy and press releases from our server on October 13, 2026. We also read the US terms and five pages by proxy sellers, a shopping blog and a proxy service. Each rule below is quoted from Mercari with the date of the version we read. English quotes from Mercari Japan's terms come from an English translation that Mercari provides for reference only. The Japanese text is the binding one.
What people search around Mercari
Keyword Planner counts 450,000 searches a month worldwide for "mercari japan", by its figures of October 13, 2026. The proxy questions sit far below that, and they point to buying. Searches for "buyee mercari" come to 14,800 a month, for "mercari japan proxy" to 1,300 and for "mercari proxy" to 390. The phrase "mercari global app" draws 260, and its last three months ran 580 percent above the three before. A Mercari rule or service decides each of these questions. The table names it.
What people search around Mercari, and what decides it
| What people search | What decides it | Does a proxy server change it? |
|---|---|---|
| buyee mercari (14,800), mercari japan proxy (1,300) | an official proxy service buys for you | no, the service does the buying |
| mercari proxy service (70) | the 54 official partners Mercari lists | no |
| mercari global app (260) | Mercari's app for the US, Taiwan and Hong Kong | no |
| mercari us (6,600) | the US terms: you must reside in the United States | no |
| mercari japan english (2,400) | Mercari's language setting, English on some screens | no |
| mercari multiple accounts (20), account suspended (40) | one account per person on both sites | no |
| mercari api (260), mercari scraper (50) | the US ban on scrapers; the Mercari Shops API for shops | no |
| japan proxy (6,600) | which country an IP address points to | yes, and only that |
Google Keyword Planner, worldwide, October 13, 2026; Mercari's terms, help articles and press releases, read October 13, 2026
Two kinds of Mercari proxy
A proxy service buys for you. Mercari's 2019 release lists the steps. You order on Buyee, and "an official Buyee account purchases the item on Mercari for the user". The seller ships the item to Buyee's warehouse in Japan, where Buyee staff check it and rate the seller. Then "Buyee ships the item to the buyer overseas, and handles all further steps."
You order from the service
abroad, in its own shop or app
Its official account buys
on Mercari, like any buyer in Japan
The seller ships
to the service's address in Japan
The service checks the item
and rates the seller
It ships abroad
and handles export and customs
Mercari's help center now calls this overseas transaction support. It serves "メルカリを利用できない海外在住のお客さま", overseas residents who cannot use Mercari. The page names 54 officially partnered cross-border operators, among them Buyee, FROM JAPAN, Zenmarket and CDJapan. Mercari also runs two such accounts itself. Partner accounts carry an official-partnership mark (公式連携), and Mercari tells sellers that an account without it is not an official partner. The seller ships to a designated address in Japan. The operator handles shipping abroad, export and customs. Mercari's English site points buyers abroad the same way, with texts such as "Now shipping internationally! Shop with our partner Buyee!"
A proxy server does something else. It passes your connection on, so a website sees the server's IP address. Mercari's account rules are about where you live, who registers and whose phone number it is. For some functions they add an identity document. A new IP address changes none of those.
The Mercari Global App
Since September 30, 2025, Mercari has had its own app for buyers abroad. The Global App launched in Taiwan and Hong Kong that day. It reached the United States on June 17, 2026, US time. Mercari says "The Mercari Global App will enable overseas buyers to browse and purchase items from Mercari and Mercari Shops in Japan." The app adds real-time AI translation and payment services for each country. Mercari also announced that it would inspect each item before shipping. The United States ranks second in Mercari's cross-border business, by value and by number of transactions. Mercari aims at over 50 countries and regions by 2028.
Nov 15, 2019
Buyee partnership
overseas buyers order through a proxy service
Aug 2024
Web version in Taiwan
May 2025
Web version in Hong Kong
Sep 30, 2025
Global App in Taiwan and Hong Kong
Jun 17, 2026
Global App in the United States
US time
Mercari's cross-border business started in 2019 with cross-border e-commerce operators. By Mercari's figures of June 2026, it exceeds 90 billion yen a year.
What a Japanese IP address changes
Mercari Japan's terms, last revised on October 22, 2025, decide who may use the site. In the English reference translation, a user "means an individual residing in Japan or an entity designated by us who uses the Service in Japan after agreeing to the Terms and Guidelines." The person registers themselves and "cannot have more than one account". Businesses other than those Mercari designates go to Mercari Shops. Mercari's help asks for one account per person (お1人さま1アカウント). It refuses a new registration on a device that has been registered before, and it forbids registering with someone else's phone number.
Identity checks reach further. Merpay, Mercari's payment arm, has strengthened them since September 2020. A check is needed before topping up a balance and, under certain conditions, before listing. The documents Mercari accepts are Japanese ones. Japanese nationals use a driver's license or a My Number card, and foreign nationals a residence card or a special permanent resident certificate. Mercari says "Currently, Mercari only offers customer support in Japanese." It asks users to message each other in Japanese, and its own guide forbids shipping items abroad.
The one thing a proxy server changes is the address a site sees, and Mercari collects that address. Its privacy policy says "The Group collects information such as IP addresses, browser types, and browser language automatically generated when you visit the Service." It also collects device information, including device identifiers. Mercari uses both to provide the service and to prevent unauthorized activity.
Looking at Mercari Japan needs no Japanese address at all. From our server in the United States, the English site answered on October 13, 2026. Its page code carries the texts Mercari shows buyers abroad. One reads "Thanks to our partnership with Buyee, we ship to over 100 countries worldwide!" Another reads "Sorry! This item is currently only available in Japan." We read the home page and robots.txt only.
Pages by proxy sellers tell another story. NaProxy says a proxy "allows you to bypass geographical restrictions and access Mercari Japan from anywhere in the world". SpyderProxy recommends dedicated Japanese IPs per account for "Mercari seller accounts". Proxyhat suggests mobile proxies "for login-dependent flows on Mercari". None of these pages mentions the Global App. None says that Mercari Japan's terms define a user as someone residing in Japan.
Mercari US
Mercari US at mercari.com refused our server with HTTP 403, so its pages come from Internet Archive copies. The terms, effective February 24, 2025, say: "To have a Mercari Account you must reside in the United States." Each user may register and keep one account. A card or bank account can sit on one account at a time. The prohibited-conduct policy, in a copy of October 11, 2026, lists "Having multiple Mercari accounts" and "Creating a new account after being limited or permanently banned". It also lists "Shipping internationally". Our page on proxies for Poshmark covers a US resale marketplace with similar rules.
Accounts, restrictions and bans
Mercari Japan's help describes three levels of restriction. The lightest runs for a set time, up to about 24 hours or a set number of days. The next is lifted only after Mercari checks your identity or asks questions, and only if it then decides to lift it. The heaviest is indefinite. The account stops, and Mercari says it is never lifted. A first violation can be enough for that. An account can also be restricted before any trade because of how it was registered, for example on someone else's behalf or as an extra account.
| How long | What ends it | |
|---|---|---|
| Set period | up to about 24 hours, or a set number of days | the period runs out |
| Review | until Mercari decides | an identity check or interview, if Mercari then lifts it |
| Indefinite | no end; the account stops | nothing, Mercari says it is never lifted |
After an indefinite restriction, Mercari's guide says, the person cannot create a new account. Mercari may ask for identity documents to find violators who use several accounts. Mercari US may verify users through a third-party service and suspend access until the check is done. It may also "prohibit a user that is terminated for engaging in any prohibited conduct from using and accessing any future services provided by Mercari".
Scraping, bots and the API
On automated access, the two Mercari sites read differently. Mercari US forbids using "any robot, spambot, spider, crawler, scraper or other automated means or interface not provided by us to access the Service or to extract data". Mercari Japan's terms and its prohibited-conduct guide contain no clause that names automation, robots or scraping. The terms do limit what users do with personal information. A user "may use Personal Information and other similar information obtained through the Service only for the purpose of using the Service." The robots.txt of jp.mercari.com was last changed on October 9, 2026. It tells every crawler to keep out of /v1/ and /v2/, and of the account, purchase, selling and transaction pages.
Mercari's official data route is for shops. A Mercari Shops owner or admin can issue an access token in the shop admin. The token connects a multi-channel management system to the shop. Mercari's help lists the systems that integrate, from order and stock tools to point-of-sale systems. We found no public API for reading the marketplace itself. Our page on whether web scraping is legal covers the general rules.
For other Japanese sites, too, the site's own terms and robots.txt come first. A Japanese IP address can belong to a hosting company, a home internet connection or a phone carrier. Which of them a site lets through is its own decision. Our explainer on what a residential proxy is shows where home connection addresses come from.
Where HProxy fits
Buying from Mercari Japan takes a proxy service or the Global App. No HProxy proxy makes anyone a Mercari user. Our proxies serve other web work, such as checking how public pages and ads look from another country. Residential proxies cost $0.44 per GB. Premium, at $1.00 per GB, adds city and ISP targeting and keeps one address for up to 24 hours. ISP proxies hold one static address. Mobile proxies cost $1.50 per GB, and datacenter proxies cost $1.58 per IP a month. Our pricing page has every plan, and each one works over HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5. To test an address, use our proxy checker or the steps in how to check if a proxy is working. Entries on our free proxy list suit a quick web test. Our page on whether free proxies are safe explains why we would not sign in to anything through one.
What we could not find out
- The Global App's own terms, and whether it serves countries beyond the three Mercari has announced.
- Whether Mercari blocks or flags proxy and VPN addresses. Its privacy policy says it collects IP addresses and device information to prevent unauthorized activity, and says no more.
- Whether search and item pages on jp.mercari.com load from abroad. We read the English home page and robots.txt, and called none of the paths robots.txt closes.
- The fees and service levels of the 54 official operators.
- What mercari.com says today. It refused our server, so the US terms and policy come from archive copies of August and October 2026.
- How the Global App's item inspection works in practice. Mercari announced it for 2026, and we have not seen it in use.
We plan to check Mercari's pages again before January 13, 2027.
Sources
Every page below was read on October 13, 2026, from our server or from an Internet Archive copy where the site refused us. The date in brackets is the page's own date.
- Mercari, Terms of Service, Japan (メルカリ利用規約, revised October 22, 2025), and its English reference translation.
- Mercari, Privacy Policy, English (revised October 30, 2025).
- Mercari Help Center, 禁止されている行為, prohibited conduct.
- Mercari Help Center, 会員登録ができない, cannot register.
- Mercari Help Center, アカウントの利用制限, account restrictions.
- Mercari Help Center, 禁止されている出品物・行為への対応, action on violations.
- Mercari Help Center, 海外取引サポート, overseas transaction support.
- Mercari Help Center, 言語設定について, language settings.
- Mercari Help Center, 本人確認の強化について, identity checks.
- Mercari, robots.txt of jp.mercari.com (changed October 9, 2026) and the English site.
- Mercari, crossborder sales through the proxy service Buyee (November 15, 2019).
- Mercari, crossborder strategy and the Mercari Global App (September 30, 2025).
- Mercari, the Mercari Global App in the United States (June 18, 2026).
- Mercari US, Terms of Service (effective February 24, 2025; archive copy of August 8, 2026).
- Mercari US, Prohibited Conduct (archive copy of October 11, 2026).
- Mercari Shops help, issuing an API access token and the systems that integrate.
- Google Keyword Planner, monthly averages for the whole world, October 13, 2026.
- Pages on the same questions, read on October 13, 2026, and not linked here: NaProxy, SpyderProxy, Proxyhat, Japan Online Shopping and Buyee.
