Case Study: Mercari achieves streamlined data governance and improved engineering efficiency with Looker

By solving data governance challenges, Mercari improves engineering efficiency and deepens data-driven insight

Mercari is a leading Japanese e‑commerce app used by millions (about 16.6M monthly users) that operates on a microservices architecture (separate services for pay, search, checkout, sell, etc.). This setup created data governance challenges: data was scattered across independent databases, analysts and engineers wrote inconsistent SQL and dashboards, relationships between sources were unclear, and duplicate reports and maintenance costs grew—limiting reliable, company‑wide insight.

Mercari standardized on Looker (with BigQuery, LookML and GitHub version control) and integrated dashboards and alerts into Slack, letting the data management team enforce modeling, KPI definitions, access control and reusable queries. The move made Looker the common channel for viewing and exploring data, organized data sources, reduced duplicate work, improved monitoring and engineering efficiency, and let ~1,800 employees focus more on extracting insights than on ad‑hoc querying.

Mercari

Noda

Analytics Department