They should really just add a rating system, I dont know anything about etsy but if customers say that they found it on alibaba with a given link then the seller would probably lose all future sales. Sounds like a very easy problem to solve...

But then Etsy lose all those sales, which presumably is why they don't do that.

Are they more committed to their morals or their profit?

That would be a very short-term perspective of them to take. If it becomes common knowledge that it's mostly repackaged chinese goods, then the storefront as a whole would collapse. In this case, preserving their morals I believe is very important to their business as a whole.

They probably only need to maintain the perception to keep most of the profits though, so look like your trying but don't do all you can.

They need to maintain their customers' perception, which is not so much about trying as actually having an effect...

Just have a 'reseller' category which users can filter our when searching if they desire, and allow reports like this to force a vendor into this category.

Likely easy to game.

And hard. I wear cufflinks. Half the good ones you can buy are artisan stuff built on aliexpress basics, and very difficult to distinguish from boring artless stuff build on the same basics. You can tell by looking, but difficult for software or for a bureaucracy. I imagine there are many categories like that.

I think parent commenter talks about crowdsourcing labeling, not software.

Yes, and when the median number of labelings for a given article is near zero (as it will be for handmade artisanal articles), it's very easy to spam in a few five-stars. The crowd you want isn't the crowd you get.

So you have to filter or supplement the user ratings/labelings/reviews using either software or inhouse people, which runs into the second problem I mentioned.

Ebay seems to do okay with their buyer/seller ratings..

Yes. And so could etsy for rating buyers and sellers. You can't spam easily if you have to spend money to do it.

But the grandparent suggested crowdsourcing saleable articles, for the kind of articles that are meant to be (simplifying) handmade.