Case Study: Mercari improves VPN accessibility and security with Tailscale

How Mercari improved accessibility, security, and made VPNs simple with Tailscale

Mercari, the e-commerce marketplace serving buyers and sellers in the U.S. and Japan, needed a more secure and reliable way for employees to access company resources from approved IP addresses. Its legacy VPN was slow, hard to manage, lacked mobile support, and created constant re-authentication and troubleshooting headaches for remote employees and QA engineers. Mercari turned to Tailscale to solve these connectivity and access challenges.

With Tailscale, Mercari deployed a simpler VPN built on WireGuard, using SAML authentication with Okta, ACLs, device tags, and exit nodes running on custom GCP VMs to control access to internal systems, third-party APIs, and financial services platforms. The result was a dramatic drop in VPN-related issues from 1–2 per day to almost zero, freeing engineers to focus on infrastructure instead of support. Mercari also reported that Tailscale was easy to deploy, reliable, and scalable for additional use cases like CI/CD and branch-to-branch communication.

Mercari

Hirotaka Nakajima

Senior Software Engineer