[j-c-hewitt]

You can create hundreds of thousands of listings almost instantly through the API or by uploading a spreadsheet to Amazon. It's not possible for manual review for all of them because of this. That is why they lean so heavily on both automation and armies of cheap contractors.

[michaelt]

So, charge a fee of $5 to add or change a product page, to cover the cost of review. Maybe refund part of it for truly trivial changes.

Or give customers an automatic refund for reporting products sold against Amazon's policies - so any 1000%-marked-up face masks are free to customers.

[beachy]

Rate limiting on the API and the spreadsheet rows, except for approved accounts.

[j-c-hewitt]

They already do this. You will get flagged for unusual activity if it is not already in your history, much like you get flagged by a credit card company for unusual purchasing behavior. While there isn't a formal probationary period various systems do get tripped more easily for new accounts with no history.

[toasterlovin]

It's possible to do manual review. We've been scraping these product categories and search result pages for the last few days. I was personally able to categorize all of the products we scraped (about 10 thousand) in a half of a day.

[Symbiote]

Suspend/delete accounts (and all listings) for anyone with a single violation.

Problem solved.

[matharmin]

And then you'll get the "My account has been banned by Amazon after misclassifying a single listing" posts.

There are two sides to the problem, and changing criteria for suspension just shifts it to the other side.

[birdyrooster]

Yeah, and that side is better so let us get shifting.

[j-c-hewitt]

Considering the amount of fraudulent reports that already go on with Amazon, this would not be tenable. Remember Amazon Marketplace wants to grow as well. It is also important for big brands to have the ability to create lots of new listings at scale. For example, every year or every fashion season, brands release entire slates of new products. It is important for Amazon to function to allow sellers and agents of brands to be able to create lots of new listings at once. Manual review would greatly delay that process and create a lot of unnecessary frustrations.

A lot of things that one might think of such as "well, whitelist the big brands" or "use enhanced reviews on sensitive, regulated categories" is already built in to Amazon's policies, protocols, and automated systems.

If you want a zero fault option, buy direct from brands. I often do that myself.