When you talk about being "deducted from the seller's account", you're talking about its third-party marketplace business. But when you talk about Vendor Central, you're talking about Amazon's first-party wholesale business.
Under first-party, Amazon is still purchasing the goods wholesale. Amazon absolutely spent the $25 for the $50 shirt. That's just how it works. That's the main discussion we're having. For you to claim otherwise is just flat-out wrong.
The drop-down about the return reasons, and about a seller choosing what to do with returned merchandise, that's about the third-party marketplace. That's a totally separate discussion, but it has nothing to do with the chargeback model you were talking about, and those are decisions sellers are making, not Amazon. And sellers are still making those decisions based on what is most profitable. If an item is "perfectly resellable", then they're still being restocked and resold. Nobody on either side is throwing away perfectly good, sellable merchandise just for the fun of it. If they think there's value in it, it gets resold.
Also:
>> Nobody on either side is throwing away perfectly good, sellable merchandise just for the fun of it.
> You keep repeating this but the investigative reports with GPS trackers put inside new items immediately returned to amazon to trace where they go and hidden cameras at landfills and industrial shredding facilities that receive truckloads of Amazon customer returns shows otherwise. The volume of it has been reduced somewhat, but not eliminated.
Just because it happened once with some items doesn't mean it's a pattern. Obviously, journalists are looking for a "gotcha" here. They're focused on finding the times when Amazon misclassified returns, or when the item is no longer selling, or whatever. They're not writing up stories when their GPS trackers showed that the items got resold.
You're trying to push an agenda here, and I'm done talking. You are falsely mischaracterizing how Amazon returns work and the financial incentives. I'm not saying Amazon doesn't throw out some returns that aren't worth reselling -- literally all retailers do this -- but this narrative that it's somehow magically cheaper for Amazon to just throw out otherwise resellable returns as a matter of standard practice is just false.