Skip McGrath is the CEO of Auction Seller’s Resource – a terrific newsletter for professional eBay merchants and for those folks aspiring to make a living on eBay.
Skip recently posted a series of interesting articles on the subject of seller certification on eBay.
Part 1
Can Seller Certification Bring Buyers Back to eBay
Part 2
eBay Selling Tools To Build Your Business by Preventing Fraud
Skip has done a nice job of laying out a number of things to consider, and I encourage you to give his posts a read.
I believe Seller Certification is part of the answer for eBay (and eCommerce in general), but my big fear is that a bunch of eBay marketing folks will get together and roll out a new "seller certification" program, and that the program will fail to actually do anything meaningful for buyers or the economic health of the eBay marketplace. Tough, effective "seller certification" programs actually require that you have to tell some sellers that they CAN’T be "certified". In my experience, marketing folks don’t like to tell current or prospective customers that they can’t do business together. Tough, effective certification programs are designed to limit the players on the field, and this is usually counter to everything the marketing folks think about each and every day.