BODY: Japan's biggest flea-market app tried to act against scalpers, and investors reacted badly.
Mercari announced that sellers can't list a new Pokémon Trading Card Game product released for the franchise's 30th anniversary. Soon after, Mercari's share price fell sharply. On Togetter, a site that collects social media posts, many Japanese users quickly suggested why the two things were connected.
Their argument is simple. Much of the activity on marketplaces like Mercari comes from tenbai (転売), the Japanese word for buying items at retail and reselling them at a markup. One widely shared comment said that "even the market thinks resale is the core of the business." If that's true, every scalping restriction a platform adds could cut into its own sales and fees. Commenters said this explains why resale platforms have been cautious about stricter rules.
The Pokémon Card Game has been one of the most heavily scalped products in Japan for years. Popular sets sell out within minutes, and stores often use lotteries, purchase limits or membership requirements to keep resellers away. Anniversary products are especially attractive to scalpers because collectors expect them to rise in value. That makes them an obvious first target for a listing ban, and also a real source of transaction volume for the platform.
The market's reaction has turned a single policy decision into a wider question. Can a company whose business depends on secondhand trading also crack down on the people who drive much of that trading?
The insider take
In Tokyo, anger at tenbai-yā (scalpers) is widely shared. People see it every time a new card set, a limited-edition figure or a game console appears. Shoppers have lined up outside electronics stores before opening, only to find the stock already listed on flea-market apps at double the price by lunchtime. That's why Mercari's ban was popular with ordinary fans. The stock drop is what many of those fans already suspected: resale platforms benefit from the scalping they say they oppose. Collectors will now watch two things: whether Mercari extends the ban to other products, and whether sellers simply move to other marketplaces.
Originally reported by 注目のまとめ - Togetter (Japanese).
I wrote this from the source's headline and summary only; I didn't open the full Togetter page. That's why the article leaves out the size of the stock drop, the product's exact name and the date of the ban. Check those on the source page before publishing if you want to add them.