I'd made one precious purchase via Mercari and it was fine. Mostly, that marketplace is never on my radar unless a Google search finds a needle in a haystack with them.

Today I found an item and noticed Mercari was teamed with PayPal's Pay in 4 offer, which is great because it's 4 interest-free payments.

I go down that path and notice on PayPal's popup window that the payments have each increased by almost $5.

Hold on. I go back the product screen and the monthlies are lower. Back to the PayPal popup and they are higher.

Two things happened:
1) Mercari added a fee if the PayPal Pay in 4 option is chosen ... this was not a credit payment with PayPal!

2) The product page now shows a different vendor, Zip, for a pay-in-4 option at the original price. Well crap, I guess I I'll try this one ...

I get setup with Zip (and a new credit report pulled, whatever) and look at my Zip account, which has a max purchase price lower than the stupid product's price. I click to purchase anyway (actually, I made an offer, so might not know if it's accepted until tomorrow) and nothing about using Zip mentioned that they might not really approve me for the entire purchase price ...

Meanwhile, I elect to rant to Mercari and their Contact Us page isn't to contact them, of course. It's a KB (knowledge base) page.

The contact page I looked at allows you to contact them, although it's a lot of steps to get through: [www.mercari.com]

And I just want to make a suggestion to them. They need an option to limit searches to sellers with feedback. There are so many obvious scams. If the price is a little too low, it's always from a 0 feedback seller.

But a good thing about Mercari are the coupons, though they are a bit random. Some items will have 20% off coupons (although now there are some with just 10% off coupons) which can make for pretty good deals.