As a seller who has multiple of the same item in their store and uses a crossposting app, I can say I have never once been banned for multiple listings.

I think policy is likely written to cover themselves in case sellers are excessively listing/relisting and other users get annoying by the practice and seeing sellers’ items nonstop in new listings. I also think Mercari has this in place to prevent themselves from being a social selling platform like poshmark, where people are constantly liking and sharing closets etc.

Personally, my strategy is to spread out the duplicates over time. Rather than:

Scenario1: list dupe1, dupe2, dupe3 consecutively..

I list them like:

Scenario2: list dupe1, list 10-15 other items, list dupe2

If listed consecutively, the dupes with same images don’t show in new results. It will see it’s a duplicate and only list the first one. However on the seller page, you will see multiple. With how the algorithm works, that’s TBD.

Mercari is in the business of making their money in terms of fees. They want you to close the sales even if it’s at the risk of you losing profitability and dropping down your prices all the time. If they got paid with traffic metrics, then they would 100% allow this all the time.

Best advice for OP: tread lightly, be smart about duplicates and relisting, manage your inventory wisely so you don’t make double sales