What a used Nintendo Switch actually sells for on Mercari (and how to pull sold prices yourself)

#python #webscraping #datascience #tutorial

If you resell consoles, the asking prices on Mercari tell you very little. Sellers list high and then cut. What matters is the price the item sold at.

I pulled the most recent sold listings for three searches on Mercari US on October 13, 2026 and cleaned them up. Here is what came out, and how you can run the same check for any product.

The numbers

I kept only listings in the Consoles category and removed boxes, cases, and "for parts" units.

Nintendo Switch OLED (31 sold consoles)

Condition	Sales	Median sold price	Range
Like new	11	$189	$139 to $279
Good	18	$161	$106 to $355
New	2	$290	$243 to $337

Nintendo Switch Lite (33 sold consoles)

Condition	Sales	Median sold price	Range
Like new	8	$113	$83 to $189
Good	19	$90	$50 to $180
Fair or Poor	5	about $48	$44 to $65

Nintendo Switch 2: only 12 real console sales in the sample, median about $395. Too few to split by condition.

These are small samples from one day, so treat them as a snapshot, not a price guide.

Three things the data showed

1. Most sellers had to cut their price to sell. 26 of the 31 OLED consoles and 26 of the 33 Lite consoles sold below their first asking price. The median cut was about 27%. The median first ask for an OLED was $250; the median sale was $167. If you price from active listings, you are pricing from numbers that mostly did not work.

2. "Like new" is worth about $25 more than "Good". On both models the gap between the two most common conditions was $23 to $28. That is the real value of a clean screen and a box, and it is smaller than many sellers assume.

3. A keyword search is mostly noise. The search "nintendo switch 2 console" returned 300 sold listings. Only 30 were in the Consoles category, and only 12 were actual Switch 2 consoles. The rest were games, cases, and boxes. The raw median for that search was $40, which is meaningless. You have to filter by category and read the titles before you trust any average.

How to pull the same data

Mercari has no public API, and the search page loads its results in the browser, so a simple page download returns an empty shell.

I built a small tool for this on Apify: Mercari Sold Listings Scraper. You give it search terms, it returns one row per listing.

Input used for this article:

{
  "queries": [
    "nintendo switch oled console",
    "nintendo switch lite console",
    "nintendo switch 2 console"
  ],
  "status": "sold",
  "maxItemsPerSearch": 300
}

Each row has the title, sold price, first asking price, price drop in percent, condition, brand, category, listing date, and the listing URL. You can export to CSV, Excel, or JSON.

This run returned 462 listings in about 25 seconds. The tool costs $1.50 per 1,000 listings, so this article's data cost less than one dollar.

Cleaning steps that matter

Filter to the right category (category = Consoles here).
Drop titles with "box only", "case", "for parts", "won't charge".
Set a price floor that removes accessories (I used $90 for the OLED, $35 for the Lite).
Split by condition before taking a median. Mixing "Poor" and "Like new" hides the number you need.
Use the median, not the average. One bundle with ten games moves the average a lot.

Limits to know about

Mercari does not show the sale date. The tool sorts by most recently sold and gives you the listing date.
Mercari returns at most about 1,000 results per search. Narrow searches give cleaner data anyway.
Prices are item prices. Shipping is not included.

If you run it on a category you know well and something looks wrong, tell me. I fix reported problems quickly.

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