Japan to eBay Price Gap — Mercari & Yahoo! Auctions Sold Prices vs eBay

What a product really sold for in Japan next to what it is listed for on eBay, in yen, with the gap after shipping and eBay fees. One row per product: the median, quartiles and range of recent sold prices on Mercari Japan (メルカリ) and Yahoo! Auctions Japan (ヤフオク), each site on its own and together, the median eBay price (item + shipping) converted to JPY at the day's European Central Bank rate, how many of those eBay listings already ship from Japan, and what is left for you per item. For anime figures, trading cards, cameras and lenses, video games, vintage clothing — anything people buy in Japan to resell abroad.

Without eBay keys it still works: you get the sold prices in Japan (median, p25–p75, min, max per site, and the combined median) and every sold item.

Try it now. The input is already filled in. Press Start (no eBay keys needed for this): Nendoroid Hatsune Miku — 100 recent sold items in Japan and one comparison row in about 20 seconds, for $0.13 (measured on 28 Oct 2026). The comparison row:

	sold	median (JPY)	p25–p75 (JPY)	sold per day
Mercari	50	4,176	3,144–7,995	8
Yahoo! Auctions	50	3,691	2,600–5,401	10.3
Japan, both	100	4,000		18.3

Add your eBay Client ID and Client Secret and the same row also gets the eBay median (item + shipping, in JPY) and the gap after shipping and eBay fees.

What you get

One comparison row per search:

Field	What it is
search, ebaySearch	the Japanese words sent to Yahoo! Auctions and the English words sent to eBay
yahooSold, yahooSoldMedianJpy, yahooSoldP25Jpy, yahooSoldP75Jpy, yahooSoldMinJpy, yahooSoldMaxJpy, yahooLastSoldAt	how many recent auctions actually sold (at least one bid, or a fixed-price sale), and their sold prices in JPY
mercariSold, mercariSoldMedianJpy, mercariSoldP25Jpy, mercariSoldP75Jpy, mercariSoldMinJpy, mercariSoldMaxJpy	the same for recent sold-out items on Mercari (including Mercari Shops)
yahooSoldPerDay, mercariSoldPerDay, japanSoldPerDay	how fast it sells: the newest 80% of the sold items read, divided by the days they span back from now, at least one day (both sites added up for Japan; the oldest 20% are left out because a sold-out search can carry a few items from years ago). It tells a product that sells ten a day from one that sold twice last month at the same median. Read from the dates of the sold items, not from the sites' result counts, which are capped
japanSold, japanSoldMedianJpy	all sold items from both sites together, and their median: the Japanese price the gap uses
ebayListings, ebayListingsRead, ebayListingsFromJapan	eBay fixed-price listings for the words, how many were read, and how many ship from Japan (your competition)
ebayMedianPrice, ebayCurrency, ebayMedianJpy, jpyPerUnit, fxDate	median eBay price including shipping, in the marketplace currency and in JPY, with the rate and its date
costs	the shipping, eBay fee % and other costs used
gapJpy, gapPercent	eBay median after fees, minus the Japanese sold median, shipping and other costs; and that as a share of the Japanese price
lastRunAt, japanSoldMedianChangeJpy, ebayMedianChangeJpy, gapChangeJpy	from the second run of the same search: when your last run was, and how the Japanese sold median, the eBay median and the gap moved since then
note	why a number is missing (no keys, nothing sold, no listings)

With Include every item on (default), each sold item (type: yahooSold: title, sold price, bids, condition, category, sold time, link; type: mercariSold: title, price, condition, whether it was a Mercari Shops item, sold time, link) and each eBay listing (type: ebayListing: title, price, shipping, condition, ships from, link) follows as its own row, so you can check the median against the actual items.

How the gap is worked out: gapJpy = ebayMedianJpy × (1 − eBay fee %) − japanSoldMedianJpy − shipping − other costs. Medians, not averages, so one rare variant does not move the price. eBay prices are asking prices of current listings; Mercari and Yahoo! Auctions prices are what buyers paid. Treat a large gap as a lead to check, not a promise.

Example (made-up numbers, to show how one comparison row reads):

{
  "type": "comparison",
  "search": "example figure",
  "japanSold": 60,
  "japanSoldMedianJpy": 4800,
  "japanSoldPerDay": 12.5,
  "ebayMedianPrice": 62,
  "ebayCurrency": "USD",
  "ebayMedianJpy": 9300,
  "ebayListingsRead": 60,
  "ebayListingsFromJapan": 31,
  "gapJpy": 268,
  "gapPercent": 5.6,
  "gapChangeJpy": -410
}

It sells about 12 a day in Japan at a median of ¥4,800. eBay asks a median of $62 (¥9,300). After the 13.25% fee and ¥3,000 shipping, ¥268 is left per item, ¥410 less than at your last run, and half the eBay listings already ship from Japan: a product to skip, not to stock.

Input

Put one product per line in Searches: the Japanese words for Mercari and Yahoo! Auctions, then |, then the English words for eBay — e.g. ねんどろいど 初音ミク | nendoroid hatsune miku, ポケモンカード リザードン | pokemon card charizard japanese, FUJIFILM X100F | fujifilm x100f. Without the | part, the same words go to both.

Leave out titles with these words drops junk, bundles and parts on both sites before the medians are worked out (prefilled with ジャンク, まとめ, 部品取り, junk, lot of, for parts; any case).

Costs: set your own. The defaults are only a starting point: Shipping 3,000 JPY (a small parcel), eBay fees 13.25 % (eBay.com's final value fee for most categories), Other costs 0 (add proxy or forwarding fees, packing, domestic shipping, payment fees).

eBay (optional): create a free developer account at developer.ebay.com, open Application Keys, and copy the Production App ID (Client ID) and Cert ID (Client Secret) into the two fields. The secret is stored encrypted by Apify and is used only to get a read-only token for eBay's official Browse API. Pick the marketplace where you would sell (US, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES, AU, CA) and, if you like, used only or new only.

Watch prices over time

Schedule the same searches every week. From the second run of a search, its comparison row says how the prices moved since your last run: lastRunAt, japanSoldMedianChangeJpy, ebayMedianChangeJpy and gapChangeJpy (on by default as Compare with my last run; the medians are kept in a named key-value store in your own Apify account). You see a product's price in Japan or on eBay move before you buy stock.

How the data is read

• Yahoo! Auctions Japan: the public closed-auction search page (/closedsearch/closedsearch, which the site's robots.txt allows), 50 items a page, newest first, with a pause between pages. Only the search words and the page number are sent. Seller names and IDs are never read or returned.
• Mercari Japan: the same search the Mercari website runs for sold-out items, newest first, 120 a page, with a pause between pages. Each run makes its own anonymous signing key, as every visitor's browser does; it never signs in and never uses anyone's account or token. Seller and buyer IDs and shop names are not returned. Mercari does not publish the moment of sale, so soldAt is the item's last update, which is when it sold for almost every item.
• eBay: only through eBay's official Browse API with your own keys. eBay's web pages are not read. Seller names are not returned.
• Exchange rate: the European Central Bank reference rate of the latest business day (via frankfurter.dev).

No login to any of the sites. E-mail addresses and phone numbers in titles are replaced with [email removed] / [phone removed]. This Actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by Mercari, Inc., LY Corporation (Yahoo! JAPAN) or eBay Inc.; you are responsible for how you use the data and for following each site's terms, and for checking import, export and resale rules for what you sell.

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.02 per comparison (one product compared) and $0.001 per item row (each sold item from Mercari or Yahoo! Auctions, or eBay listing; turn off Include every item to pay only for comparisons), plus $0.01 per run. Apify's platform usage is billed separately.

For AI agents

Call it with one product and read the first row:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/northbell~japan-ebay-price-gap/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"searches":["ねんどろいど 初音ミク | nendoroid hatsune miku"],"includeItems":false,"ebayClientId":"YOUR_EBAY_APP_ID","ebayClientSecret":"YOUR_EBAY_CERT_ID"}'

The first row is the comparison; gapJpy is what is left per item after the costs you set.