Mercari Atte

» see atte.mercari.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Mercari Atte only worked if you and the other person were close enough to walk to each other. From Turkey the nearest Atte user sat a continent and a sea away, which is the one kind of distance the product had no answer for. Proximity was not a feature of this app. It was the entire mechanism.

The reasoning was sound. Mercari had built an enormous flea market in which everything moved by courier, and courier pricing quietly decides what can be sold: a paperback travels fine, a two-seater sofa does not, and the gap between the two is full of perfectly good furniture that goes to landfill because posting it costs more than it is worth. Atte took the location out of the shipping label and made it the filter. You saw what was near, you agreed to meet, you carried it home yourself. No delivery address, no card on file, nothing to pay.

It also went further than goods. You could give things away or lend them, offer a skill, ask for help with something, or simply look for people to do a thing with. Mercari sold objects; Souzoh wanted Atte to handle everything around them that was not an object.

~ the dossier ~

~ one day in ~

On 18 March 2016, one day after launch, J-CAST ran a piece reporting that users were describing Atte as a hookup app. The logic was not complicated. Here was a free service, needing no real identity, that matched nearby strangers who then met in person, and one of the listed categories was services rather than things. The terms of use had to state plainly that sexual acts were not among the services on offer.

Nothing came of it in the end, no scandal and no regulator, and the app ran another two years and two months. But it is a useful marker of how fast the Japanese press had learned to read a product like this by 2016, and of the thing that makes location-based trading harder than it looks: the same design that lets a neighbor collect your bookshelf lets anybody within two kilometers see where you will be standing at seven.

~ three dates in a row ~

Mercari announced the closure on 16 March 2018, one day short of Atte's second birthday, and did it in stages. On 29 March you could no longer post anything new. On 26 April applying to listings and leaving comments stopped, and an app full of offers became a catalog nobody could answer. On 31 May the whole thing went off.

Mercari gave the reason as concentrating the group's management resources, and in this case the phrase appears to mean exactly what it says. Mercari closed Kauru, its books and discs app, in the same period, and folded its experimental arm back toward the main product. Atte did not fail loudly and it was never sued. It got switched off because the people building it were wanted on the main app, two years and two months after it opened.

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