Yeah, the difficult part is that the seller just returns under a different name. Enough complaints have come in about marketplace seller GreatElectronics4U? OK, Amazon bans/suspends GreatElectronics4U and the guy behind it starts selling stuff as AllTheBestElectronics4U. Rinse and repeat.
This isn't like the old days when a ban on doing business under your current name would be a death blow ... start a new seller account and your junk still shows up in Amazon search results, just like it did yesterday.
That's why I'm saying have folks put-up $2,500 when you sell more than 10-20 items per year. It won't be perfect, but it puts a big speedbump there for folks who want to rinse and repeat. A lot of overseas sellers have very low labor costs, so new accounts are cheap from a person perspective but $2,500 is not cheap overseas - so the accounts paying this would be ideally be then really cared for.
What exactly is the proposed solution? Amazon already requires ID verification to open new accounts, and will ban accounts that they can link to old banned accounts.
I also don't have first-hand knowledge of the situation on the ground in, for example, China. But my perception (and that of others I've talked to), is that Chinese sellers just sign up to open a new account, no problem. I'm not sure if that means using the info of a relative or friend, or fake documents, or if my perception is just completely wrong.
It'd be interesting to hear from anyone who has seen things on the ground on that side of the world!
I've certainly talked to many US sellers who openly admit to running multiple accounts. Many feel that it's just not responsible to only run a single account if you're doing significant volume, even 100% legitimately.
Money. Charge or require even a deposit of $2,500 on a credit card in your name.
Sure, you can continue to was accounts (and even legit business may decide to invest in 3-4 different names to cover different segments / backup protection). But right now the scam seller cost / pain is so low for bad behavior (other than in time which they have lots of) that something needs to change at least a bit.
A bond requirement after a certain amount of sales isn't a bad idea, but the threshold should be significantly higher, maybe over 50k or 100k in sales in a year.
A better idea may be to enforce the insurance requirement. This de facto requires sellers to commit a similar sum of money towards the business, but they're getting something for it instead of it being tied up. The Amazon contract says if you sell over 10k/month for 3 months then you must carry $1 million in liability insurance. The threshold seems about right, if they'd require proof of insurance for anyone over that threshold it would mostly fix bad actors using multiple accounts, while mostly leaving alone those that have legitimate business purposes in running multiple accounts.
This isn't like the old days when a ban on doing business under your current name would be a death blow ... start a new seller account and your junk still shows up in Amazon search results, just like it did yesterday.